Pirouettes
by omgpink
Summary: HIBARIxOC. The women in KHR cook and clean. They are objects of love or damsels in distress or failed fighters. How much of the mafia's darkness can they really handle?
1. Prologue

**I do not own Katekyo Hitman Reborn!**

* * *

"I fell in to a burning ring of fire  
I went down,down,down  
and the flames went higher.  
And it burns,burns,burns  
the ring of fire  
the ring of fire."

-Johnny Cash, 'Ring of Fire'

**PIROUETTES ON CLOUD NINE**  
;;prologue

People crossed the bridge behind her as she sourly leaned against the rail. There were mothers coming home with groceries for dinner, mailmen making their final rounds, younger kids drinking soda and jeering. On the banks, old people sat on their porches in rocking chairs, telling each other the evening was wonderful, drinking tea and basking in the normal peace that skims the world like the cream of milk. Yuka was the only one with this lead ball of angst consuming her like a violent scribble. Oh dear. We are beginning from the middle, aren't we? Let me flip to another dog-ear...

What is the recipe for a normal day? Nothing is normal – ever normal – in the world of reborn or even in reality for that matter! We each have secrets, tasty tales mocked on soap operas. The girl who sits behind you in English, well, she's rather bitter about her parents' divorce. That guy over there, grinning with the soccer ball under his arm, he beats his little brother up all the time and likes to sneak his dad's beer. (He thinks he's cool, you know?) War. Cancer. STDs. Let me set a stage like Shakespeare reads the tabloids.

Are there girls who talks about their boyfriends so often that all their single friends turn their shoulders? Are there guys reading porn on there phone when their mothers merely assume they are obnoxiously texting at the dinner table? We complain that girls hate each other and that guys are stupid perverted assholes, but when is this true? Boys are sensitive but can never admit it. Girls are scared about confronting their issues because it's _embarrassing_. In the end, everyone speaks too much and says too little. No one can read minds. Misunderstandings ensue. Cruel intentions. Boring friends. Pestering cell phone ring tones. Crushes. Stalking. Confessing. Confessing! What is this, a manga? Sort of? (Don't ask me!) Confessing? Alcohol! (Durr!) And a string of events that will end in a divorce, and then, living through your children.

Whoops, no, that's just what's on my Vitamin Water bottle. Yamamoto loves'em, but he usually just gets a coke like his friends because its cheaper. He's also a little too simple to admit that the world is really a collection of isolated fishbowl towns just like Namimori. His chemistry grade is too low for him to really appreciate how every man is made of islands of atoms nudging each other. Let's not be pretentious. Let's be more like Yamamoto for a second. Kids! Children! The sun will smile in its snazzy aviators as the storm clouds waddle about the horizon. Girls will discuss this over kawaii cakes as rain will splash the windows. Thunder will hover over the radio tower and strike where once the Shinto hermits hummed in their gardens. And the sky will be saturated with color. Oh, the sky! It's on every page! We are always looking up, not down! Never read between the lines. A drawing might tell a thousand words, but I can tell you far more in this corner of a manga plot, isolated in the cave of a fan fiction URL.

So Yuka, another spin-the-bottle protagonist chick, had secrets, problems, and strife like gnats in her eyes. The Namimori citizenry had no reason to suspect the innocuous schoolgirl, meditating upon the current, to be plotting murder or mutiny. Yuka munched her gum with a vengeance while her dark eyes followed the dancing ripples below. She pinched her lips and pulled her gum, a disgusting habit really. Her heel scratched at her socks. What a kid. The air vibrated with the heat of teenage angst and the fermentation of plowed feelings. Oh god.

A storm was coming in from the pacific, giving the river an inky, mysterious darkness. Namimori, district of suburbs and Tokyo commuters, homeland of the average Takeshi, was having a pretty gorgeous moment – nature stretching its poetry. Those dark depths—they threatened her with their suffocating power. Yuka stared into the murkiness, vexed and uncomfortable as she pressed her thumb to her chin and leaned her weight on the rail. If she could only eliminate that renegade School Disciplinary President, Hibari Kyoya. She was having trouble with school, too. Children these days the old folks would mumble – lessons, rules, pavement where there feet should touch grass – what ever happened to a real childhood? Even Tsuna will grow up with the rottenness of exams that emphasize the zero of his hero. Yeah, Yuka wondered what time it was, and then, stubbornly threw the thought away. Why should she care?

If she hadn't brawled with the Head Prefect on Wednesday, she would have never gotten in trouble with her guardian, the ferocious Lal Mirch. No dilly-dallying. Smelling roses was for day-dreaming wimps. Roses didn't grow into our noses, after all. "See, even in Wonderland, smelling a flower was ridiculous idea," Lal would once scoff behind the large storybook she once read, pointing at the illustration. "Like I always would tell you." Oh, the commentaries that girl suffered as she hugged her teddy.

But transferring from Midori to Namimori last week had been a mistake. Why not Kokuyo? She already knew a couple people there, vaguely. But Lal Mirch had preferred the flagship academy and that was why Yuka had switched from a buttercup yellow jersey to a white button-up.

But why switch at all?

The Varia hunting dogs had her scarf in their nose. Lal Mirch didn't like it. Their smoke bombs and swords weren't Lal Mirch's gig. "School, then University, and then, the military," Lal had prompted. "The Varia are a pack of idiots." She was Lal Mirch's puppy dog. _'Like hell anyone would touch her.'_

The girl puzzled over her life with an impatient stare. She saw nothing but the swirl of her thoughts in the inky lines of the current. Every time she thought for herself, she realized how defenseless she was against the Varia. Their dark coats, their secret agent technology, and their reputation alone, why, she should have a bullet through her forehead by now. But Hibari, he was just Hibari. One guy. Same age. How much training had he over her? She fumed like a sour brat at violin lessons that hated practicing and jealously watched the best player in the class fiddle the national anthem. What made Hibari so special? Why couldn't he have this attention thrown at him. Why couldn't he be the miserable and angry one? Oh, the governor of Namimori, king of the castle, with the thumping-red stamp to veto and the old man's frown to match.

Unfortunately, it was difficult for such a rough-and-tumble girl to qualm her monkey king kung-fu fury. How could she really stop fighting? Look how long it takes for a war to fizzle into the gutter, and then remind yourself that Yuka is the result of a military education honed by the she-devil herself. The Jane Austen cunning of an all Girl's preparatory school doesn't help either. Lot of hot air in this one. A cute little paradox, you know, to match that black and white photograph of delinquent disciplinarian. You know, neither of them wants a hero.

At Namimori, she could judge the prefect as if she had voted against him in the primary. You can bet he got it worse than G.W. from her.

Yeah, what an idiot! Men could be so pushy! Pushy like riptides. You had to fight with all your mettle to reach dry land. And this violence, this language men chattered, trying to silence her with their ruckus, well, she had become pretty fluent. But for now, her fists were silenced, mute, tied. Because women didn't fight back. Women that did, well, rumors spread, and rumors were dangerous when an assassination team was combing the town. She would have to bury her fighting spirit once more. Maybe her happily ever after could come one day. She scried the river for revenge as Rapunzel might have scanned the horizon for her prince, which was maybe what finally made her decide that this entire boo-fucking-hoo display was stupid. The water leaped up the support columns, chorusing her thoughts.

She had fought too long and too hard. Her stitched uniform symbolized her struggle. Girlhood was at stake. No system, no man, no submissive gender role would make her go silently into the night. Midori middle, that elitist girl's prep school down the road, well, it had tried to break her feisty "bad attitude." They had tried to teach her a wife's place: to smile sweetly and quietly. Bow like this, curtsy like that, god forbid your shit didn't smell like lavender. But what if she wanted to grow up to be an independent woman? A woman who made do on her own, without a man ruling her life? Nor a military commander in the reserve. Yuka's clay heart had yet to be fired. Lumpy and useless and uncertain. Today, particularly wet and heavy.

Hastily, Yuka smushed another stick of gum into her gnashing mouth and exploded:

"Augh! Alpha-Jerkface Hibari Kyoya can shove his tonfas up his ass!"

She yanked up her bag and whipped it over her shoulder, flipped her hair, the works. Everybody needs to vent.

"What did you just call me?"

And lo and behold, behind her stood Mr. Alpha-Jerkface himself, eyes narrowed, tonfas bared. He frowned at what he saw.


	2. Midori Madness

Midori Madness

So now, we're going to press rewind on that retro boom-box as funky as a myspace booty call and slip back into the past. Slip like a fish back through the story you have yet to read, unless this is your second time, or third time through the text like we've all done to that slut the Harry Potter Series, (no, I really am just jealous) and stalk Yuka's first trot on the Namimori sidewalk that matters.

Step on a crack and break your mother's back. After reading her aunt's note on the fridge, a manly, messy scrawl of ink, Yuka left for school. Lal Mirch would be out of town, and with a tweak in her lips, the brat imagined everything she was going to do. Yuka's poufy, funky marigold-yellow messy bun bounced and jiggled to her confident trot. Soft pink and yellow hair clips failed to keep her wild mop secure. Wisps of baby pink ends, from the time she dyed her 'do electric pink, poked out like porcupine quills. If Yuka had her way, her head would be crowned with a luxurious magenta mane, but Lal Mirch had disapproved of her first drastic hairstyle. What's wrong with dying your hair? She was still in school, not yet in the real world. She didn't have to look like dumbass blonde mama's-girl, goody two shoes, afraid of nail polish, dress to impress bimbo. She just wanted to be herself.

She had flashing mauve eyes, just like her aunt, and her pretty blonde hair was dark at the roots because she was naturally a brunette. Yes, she could use touch up according to the girl mags Kyoko reads. She could also shave her legs, but the little hairs weren't very noticeable just yet. Is laziness a sin? (Does Lal Mirch not shave either?)

The mailman complimented her with a raised eyebrow. Nothing about the girl matched that sickeningly cheerful Midori uniform. Her magenta nail polish, pink and yellow hairpins, and poufy, funky, blonde messy-bun screamed of the pop music scene. She was missing gauges—her ears eerily bare—but three chunky, thrifty silver rings studded her fingers to make a punch stick. The first had a fleur-de-lis, the second had a butterfly, and the third had a flying swan, and when she takes them off at night, they leave a green stain around her fingers. She faked a smile back at the mailman, and took a turn at the corner, lackadaisically swinging herself around a lamppost. The pendant of a necklace flew out and caught the light as if it were flailing its arms to be noticed.

It was her most precious treasure. It was the ring of her mother, cut from a solid piece of jade, a bloody shade of violet twisting with black veins. It spun and cried, but she couldn't hear its dark whispering over the crackle of the sunlight.

The mailman watched her disappear around the bend. That girl didn't suit her Midori uniform, and she confused him every time they crossed paths like a clown confuses James Bond. Midori was a very strict girls' prep school. They were fiercely principled in building proper young ladies, well-educated in math, science and the language arts. Yuka's existence was a mockery of their institution. She was their punk, their rebel, and given another year, she would be smoking who knows what across the street before school started. Haru would have graduated and Yuka would have been held back. Yuka didn't think she belonged at Midori, but regardless, she was a part of it.

She met up with Haru several blocks from the apartment. The cosplay maniac wore the costume of a purple octopus, and its tentacles were so big, they splayed into the street. A napkin with a hungry oni with a fork and knife licking its chops was wound around the octopus's neck. The two old friends greeted each other, and began to head in the same direction.

"It's so exciting! Last night, Kyoko's brother and Tsuna and his friends fought together in a Sumo tournament and won! And Tsuna…,Tsuna, he is so strong and brave. I couldn't believe it at first, but ever since he saved my life! I know he must like me to have done what he has done." Goosebumps grew beneath her costume as she recalled the touch of his arms around her.

"If you like him so much, why don't you ask him out? You know, take the initiative?" Yuka asked, a little bored. There was always news about this Tsuna with Haru, but she had never met the boy before. Yuka could feel a mild hardness grow between them because she didn't know this boy and she suspected the yodelers of exaggeration. She mimicked the mailman. "What if he isn't as tough as you think?"

"Ha! There is no one that can beat Tsuna! He will propose to me when the time is right." Yuka watched helplessly as Haru sliped into daydream mode. She was obviously reliving that famous titanic scene when Decaprio held the girl at the front bow of the ship. Haru's arms spread like a bird and Yuka moved to the edge of the sidewalk to give the octopus some room, holding in a giggle.

After a bit, Haru came back down to Earth. "Yuka, do you like any boys?"

"Nope," she smirked while chewing her berry blast gum. "I'm not interested in having a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship." She couldn't imagine herself baking cookies and making chocolates. She couldn't imagine shyly giving them to a boy to wolf down and then snog her without brushing his teeth.

"But wouldn't it be great to have someone supporting you no matter what? To always make you feel better when you're feeling down?"

Yuka was swayed. Haru would do this sometimes. Touch her romantic side. Then, she shook off the feeling. There was no such thing as couch love for her, no such thing as peace enough to sit quietly and stroke some boyfriend's head. _Because it's not like that with any of the boys I've met__._ Which was true. No guy had ever given Yuka an ounce of respect until she made them with her fists. They ogled at her through beady eyes, leapt out of the mists at her like monsters when all she wanted was to find grandmother's house. "It might be nice, but it isn't anything I need," she answered indifferently.

"That's why I like Tsuna so much. If he hadn't come by when I was stuck on that electric pole, I don't know what would have happened to me!"

"Well, you shouldn't climb on those things."

"I know, I know, I don't seem the type, but it happens to everyone at least once."

As they neared school, the clock rising up over the neighborhood, Yuka caught sight of Igarashi stalking by the school gate. The old woman sensei looked like a hunch-back vulture despite her professional a-line skirt and pin-striped blazer. That old bag Mrs. Igarashi had grasshopper legs and the lung capacity of an Olympic swimmer. Her wrinkled skin matched the antique wrought iron school gate, her gray hair was chameleonic against the marble gate posts. Mrs. Igarashi was a tough old literature teacher, a world wonder of conservatism.

"Besides, you're going to get in trouble again," Haru said, looking down at her socks. "Maybe you shouldn't wear those things," Haru said, nudging her friend in the ribs with a tentacle. "Your socks don't match either..." Indeed, Yuka's socks did not match. They weren't even uniform regulation, one being a bright sunshine yellow cross-knit knee-high with a hole near the ankle, the other, a blue tie-dyed white cotton tube sock.

"That's what happens when you do your own laundry," Yuka shrugged. She had given up matching socks two years ago. "At least they match the prude-iform," Yuka defended.

"Here, wear my bow tie today, Yuka. I don't want you to get in trouble anymore," Haru pleaded, beginning to untie hers.

"No. You keep it. But someday, Haru, I promise you won't have to wear it either." Yuka's mauve eyes sparkled with resolution.

"Yuka, really, Mrs. Igarashi said yesterday that—"

"No! You know, it feels like a dog collar. It's... it's uncomfortable. Like it's choking me every time I wear it." She knitted her eyebrow, irritated and vexed by the recollection. She put her hand to her shirt's collar, probing for a silver chain necklace. Yuka's chain held the ring her mother had once worn. Finding it, she rubbed it between her fingers as if it were a talisman for good luck. It was a band cut from a solid stone, a rare form of jade.

"Besides, you know the bane of my existence is to break school rules," Yuka jeered sarcastically, elbowing Haru. Haru giggled knowingly and whimsically twisted her tentacles.

Yuka let Haru walk a little bit in front of her, the girl was already back in dream mode. She didn't want her to get one of Mrs. Igarashi's bad mood punishments. Mrs. Igarashi was a tough old literature teacher. She was very conservative and wore the Midori teacher's uniform with the button always tight and new. When Yuka came to school last year with her hair dyed pink, Mrs. Igarashi gave her a pair of scissor or a bottle of black hair dye every day, and then a detention for every day she refused to change. Auntie Lal had to go to a parent-teacher conference to ask the old lady to give it a break, but the old bat turned her own aunt against her, and back to black she returned.

Yuka didn't like her at all, and if Haru turned around, she would see it in her friends face.

"_Yuka!_ You have a visitor in the main office. Please go there immediately. And take off those ATROCIOUS socks. They are NOT school regulation. How many times must I prod at the rules for you?"

"Make me," Yuka leered, but stalked in the office's direction to appease the teacher after the venomous look that was returned to her. Mrs. Igarashi wasn't the principal, but as the eldest faculty member, revered. If the principal was the president, she was the pope. Yuka was pleased to notice 's mouth pucker as if an acid drop had popped into her mouth.

* * *

The last time she saw the headmistress, the woman ranted about how she was a _"a deescracce to her geeendre."_ The woman spit out the tripe she digested for years the way flies eat and vomit and eat and vomit. Yes, that particularly awful morning was when she had gotten in a fight with some thugs outside the school gate.

They wore green uniforms with brass button. They were the worst kind of guys ever: the kind who think an all-girls school is their own personal harem. She could see it in their narrow faces and the curl in their hands that fit for masturbation. Because of Mrs. Igarashi's detention, Yuka walked out the school gates alone that afternoon, her hair just dyed black again and a grudgingly obedient image of Midori perfection.

"Sweatheart, come ova here for a second."

"OW-OWWW!" another howled. Yuka's rhythmically flopping bun settled as she came to a halt. An invitation? No. More like bait. And one of them took it. She glanced over her shoulder to see one of the group casually approaching her from behind, grinning confidently. He wore his Kokuyo uniform ripped to shreds. A stupid trend, but it did make him look tougher. Yuka eyed the ground while she waited for his footsteps to reach her. Pat, pat pat. Like soft heartbeats. She could hear him chuckling. She chuckled too, but the Kokuyo student never noticed.

Finally, an arm clamped over her shoulder, pulling her forcefully in the direction of his armpit. "Hey toots, I know a place we can go," he whispered seductively, a hint of experience in his gruff voice. He was athletic. He was handsome too, in a bloodthirsty maniac kind of way. He smelled heavily of cologne, and the spicy smell put Yuka, against her will, into a more forgiving mood. It was harder to cringe in disgust the way she wanted too. She stared at the hand clutching her shoulder possessively, contemplating how she would break the attraction she was feeling. _No. I don't want this kind of attention. _But his smell was intoxicating. Addicting. She hadn't expected it.

The punk became annoyed when she didn't say anything back, keeping her head turned away from him to look at his hand on her opposite shoulder. He reached out and cupped the girl's chin, squishing her cheeks. He turned her head and forced her to look at him. She had a nice body, not crazy nice like some of the other women he'd fucked, but good enough. Her arms and legs were a bit too lanky for his taste and her breasts were nowhere near his desired cup-size. But damn, with a skirt like that, she was asking for it. He was already having fantasies of putting her in her place, not in detention like Mrs. Igarashi, but sprawled completely naked in a motel room bed.

So when he turned her face to his, this name-less Kokuyo student expected a bunny-rabbit cutey-wootey I'm-scared-because-its-my-first-time pout on _his_ captured young schoolgirl. To his astonishment, Yuka smirked like a sharp-toothed lantern fish who had lured an unsuspecting guppy with its bio luminescent hook. No motherfucker touched her face.

"You need more tag," she scoffed, elbowing him in the ribs. He smelled sickly sweet now.

And just like that, all hell broke loose. His Kokuyo buddies joined in when they saw their friend being beaten unconscious by a mad banshee. 'How did this bitch get so tough?' they asked themselves. But their thoughts did not last long. Yuka's fists soon pummeled them into darkness, unconscious darkness. If Reborn were there, he would have recognized her fighting stance as Lal Mirch's and would have immediately deduced she was the Chili Pepper's student. Surprisingly, reborn wasn't there, like in many KHR fanfics. He was too busy helping Tsuna become a man worthy of the Vongola Famiglia. Today, that meant teaching Tsuna how to shave, no matter how obvious it was that the poor boy would never grow a single chest hair, let alone a beard and side burns.

No, instead of reborn magically appearing in a cheerleader outfit, a rather large crowd of people had gathered around Yuka's scuffle. Many were shocked. Others joked that the mad fem was really a cross-dressing boy. Finally, attracted by the ruckus outside the school gates, Mrs. Igarashi pried her way through the crowd. Yuka had once told Haru that she would give her a hundred dollars to see Mrs. Rushito's stone cold face crack. Too bad she missed it.

Yuka was still kicking the smelly Mr. Torn-shirt when Mrs. Igarashi yanked and hauled her by the arm back to Midori. Rule number one for Yuka: _If you want to knock me up, I want to knock you down._ But Mrs. Igarashi had her own set of rules.

Midori girls do not fight.

Nope.

They just pour tea and look pretty.

"Eet's youhr fault, Madmoiselle. Stop weahring youhr skirt so hiygh. You provvvohc thehm."

_But it's their fault for provoking me._

Yuka could only sit there and fume, the inky twist of fighting dragons blooming above her head. The PE teacher, Ms. Ichi, had tied her to a chair and duck taped her mouth.

"You need more discipline," Ms. Ichi scorned. Mrs. Igarashi stood nearby and suggested a suspension. Yuka didn't struggle, tranquilized by smell of tea. All she could do was roll her eyes. The teachers were hopeless. They would not understand her, let alone, try to.

* * *

So, as Murkuro says that he weaves illusions within illusions, we now must withdraw from this confusing flashback, from straight hair and clean nails, to an even more confusing display of unmatching colors that is Yuka today.

Yuka thought the principal would scold her, so she only pretended to follow Igarashi's pointing claw. She climbed the fire escape and pushed herself onto the roof, skipping first period so that she couldn't be called down from class. The rust from the fire escape left gritty red flakes on her hands. She brushed them off on her skirt. Then she crouched behind the rampart and began to pick at her nail polish.

Meanwhile, in the principal's office, an impatient Italian man fumed. If it weren't for so many good-looking lady teachers, he would have killed somebody by now. Superbi Squalo had been sent to kidnap Varia's future cloud. (The Mosca robot was defeated last week.) But it was already 9:00 A.M. and she still hadn't come in to school yet! His tight, bull-shark body paced the administrative office's waiting area, staring death at the portrait of previous lady principles

"VVVOOOIIIIIII! WHERE IS THE BRAT!" he raged.

"Sir please calm down. I'm sure she will be here any moment," said a lovely lady secretary, whose batting lashes could tranquilize a charging elephant. Then, she went back to typing records, no, number, no word, no letter on her screen before Squalo exploded again, and she had to look up. The exchange went on and on until papers flew into the air and the man stormed out. In the intervening time, another secretary contacted Yuka's guardian, Lal Mirch, to confirm releasing the girl to this man.

"Oh my, well, Ma'am he seems to be leaving as I speak. Such a temper," she mused into the phone, holding the cord with her other hand.

As Squalo threw open the double doors, he did not escape the notice of Yuka. Yuka was playing yo-yo with her spit, and lost the glob at his sudden appearance below. The glob of spit missed, but Yuka was fast. She thought the long silver hair belong to Mrs. Igarashi!

The opportunity was too good to miss. Down went a bottle full of strawberry kool aid right on Squalo's beautiful silver mane!

Squalo was shocked to feel liquid stream down his face. What had drenched his beautiful hair? Was it blood? No. He smelled it and recognized the sweet scent instantly. Squalo actually liked kool aid, but not on his head. His head shot up, and caught the site of a face, hands covering a smile, zip back over the rampart.

Enraged he scaled the wall and confronted a surprised Yuka, who did not think that was humanly possible until she saw Squalo do it.

"VVVOOOOIII! YOU'LL PAY FOR WHAT YOU DID, GIRL!"

"Wait!" He was like Lal when she was angry, and scared Yuka just the same. "H-how did you do that? Who are you? I thought you were a teacher! I-I am sorry. It was an accident… I didn't mean it for you… sir." She gulped and braced herself.

Yuka had nothing against him. It looked like this man put a lot of maintenance into it, and Yuka new a thing or two about maintenance. But, despite her obvious sincerity, Squalo immediately launch an attack, interrupting her gulp as she jumped away. She could hardly manage to evade him, and a hand caught in her hair and pulled her to the ground.

Thankfully, Reborn had appeared on Yuka's head, pointing a Leon-gun at Squalo. "Go away, Squalo," Reborn warned. Then, he kicked Yuka's head by stomping with his suede shoe.

"Stupid kid. Lal Mirch asked me to check up on you." Because Squalo was the loudest mafia ever, according to Fuuta's rankings, Lal had heard his "Never mind!" as he stormed out. Reborn's eyes narrowed at Squalo. "The Vongola Succession battles are over. What does Varia want with Namimori?"

"Varia?! What?" Yuka cried, practically falling over.

So Squalo had to say something to cover up SECRET Mission 'Get me a fucken cloud guardian.' Xanxus was planning something. To rebuild Varia's strength? But he was too angry to continue this train of thought.

"GGGGGGGGGGGGGAAAAAAAARRRRRRR R! DAMMMIIIT! OUT OF THE WAY REBORN. SHE'S ON OUR HITLIST." Hopefully, the Vongola would think she was dead when he finally did capture her. He didn't want this to turn into any kind of pursuit—he just wanted to snatch the girl and run away.

In this confrontation, the ring around Yuka's neck sang, but the girl could not touch the ring as she fought for her hair to not be ripped out of her head.

Suddenly, Lussuria, in the escape Ferrari, pulled into Midori's driveway and called to Squalo in that adorable way that makes us love him so much.

"Sqwaaaa-llooooo. I'm HHHEEEEErrrrreeee 3"

Reborn shot at Squalo, but in the kick of a fish, he dodged it. His face was still red from embarrassment at Lussuria's behavior.

"SHHHHHHUUDDDUUUP LUSSURIA!" he shouted, and then, he pointed at Yuka and yelled, "SAY GOODBYE TO NAMIMORI! I'LL BE BACK!"

Yuka heaved on her spot on the roof.

"I thought Lal Mirch taught you how to fight," her aunt's friend squeaked.

"I-I thought she did, too," she said after silence.

* * *

Back at Lal Mirch's apartment, Reborn and Lal Mirch, stood on books piled on chairs at the kitchen table. Documents were spread out in front of them some with Midori's crest, others with Namimori Middle's crest. They gave her a new surname. No more odd uniforms. No standing out whatsoever.

She sunk bitterly between them as she watched them talk. She signed where she was told Mirch seemed upset. Yuka recognized it from her silence. She was the kind of woman who shouted at the dishes for being dirty.


	3. Something New: The Darkhaired Jerk

Something New: The Dark-haired Jerk

"You need to dress conservatively. You can't flounce around anymore… Yuka, are you listening to me!?" Lal Mirch scolded. "I've been lax about it before because I don't have the time for this," and she flailed her hands around to signify putting up with Yuka's teenager quirks, "But you will follow the rules from now on. You will act proper and you will act _normal_." Lal Mirch sat, propped up high so she could cut Yuka's hair. The tone of the scene is a family-orientated comedy sitcom.

Yuka was miffed, to say the least. She couldn't even paint her nails. "And aren't you the perfect role model?" Yuka sulked.

"Yuka, this is serious. If Squalo finds you, that's all there is to it. You won't stand a chance. So stop acting like a fool and hold still. I can't cut your hair if you're jerking around." Lal whacked Yuka on the head, her husky voice soft and militant.

"Oww. But, I just want a mirror!" she protested. There was a compact mirror on the counter.

"Heh. You can look when I'm done." Lal Mirch smiled maliciously.

"What!?" Yuka quickly turned around and swiped the scissors from Lal and ran to the mirror in the bathroom.

"I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU! I can't go to school like this!" Her hair was cut completely uneven. Strands in the back were much shorter than parts of the front. At least her bangs were untouched.

"Then listen to me when I tell you to stay out of trouble. This Midori Incident," she said hopping onto the sink and shuffling to stand in Yuka's face, "is something that your mother did not want to happen."

"Mom?"

Lal Mirch whacked her for interrupting.

"Things have settled down. Tomorrow night, we're training. You'll get the brunt of your punishment then." Not good. There was training, and then there was Midnight Punishment Training: an entire night of mountain climbing, soccer field suicides, and hand to hand combat training with the one and only Lal. The infant woman hopped down and disappeared, and the girl was left to herself and her reflection.

"What did Mom say?" but no one answered.

Fuming, she began, carefully, to salvage her hair.

* * *

At some point that weekend, Yuka met Tsuna, Yamamoto, and Gokudera. The entire affair was chaos and a half with lost pythons and an assassin weed-whacker. However, for the life of her, she could not remember Tsuna's face afterwards. She wondered how Haru had ever become impressed by him, but before the thought could be further reflected upon, Lal Mirch kicked her ass and other larger problems distracted her.

* * *

On a crisp, breezy Monday morning, Yuka set off for school. As she waved to the mailman beginning his rounds, she grumbled about how she did not look herself at all. No, she looked like a two-year-old, with her short cut peachy bob and freshly pressed Namimori uniform. The mailman looked at her in confusion. He thought she looked familiar, but just simply could not place her. Ahh! It was the girl who saved him from yet another dog whose favorite flavor was mailman. He then waved how-de-doo cheerfully.

But Yuka only looked blackly at the ground this lovely morning. Her appearance was, perhaps, saved from utter immaturity, by a new pair of black, horn-rimmed glasses of the sort worn by huffy, shut-up-you-little-hooligans librarians. Or, like Mrs. Igarashi. Or, like, nobody. Her mother's ring, attached to a silver necklace, was concealed under her blouse. She rubbed the talisman furiously, wishing her frustrations away. The purple jade grew darker and darker and, unnoticed, almost seeming to swirl. Yuka persuaded Lal Mirch to let her wear it, as long as she kept it hidden. It wasn't a hard argument to make—Lal had always preferred that she wear it.

Even though the rising sun warmed her shoulders, Yuka was cold with gloom. _I miss walking with Haru. I miss dressing up. _She didn't want to change schools and she never missed the exalting school roof, the old marble gateway, or the lurking Mrs. Igarashi more. Little tickling caterpillars crawled around in her gut, eating her edges as if she were a leaf. It was new water.

Turning the corner, she bumped into Yamamoto and Tsuna on their way to school.

"Yuka-san. Good morning!" Tsuna waved.

"Yamamoto-san, Tsuna-san, what's up! Hey listen, Yamamoto, can girls join sports clubs like the baseball club at Namimori? You told me about Baseball Club last night, but uh, the snake tried to eat his kid brother…."

"He's not my brother!" Gokudera said, coming up sourly beside Yuka and butting in. "How can a four-eyes play sports anyway. You look like my grandmother with those _spectacles_." He pointed at Yuka's horn-rimmed glasses and looked at her like she was an idiot. You could say Yuka was a hipster.

"What are you talking about! These frames have character!"

_Then again, I'd be bitter to__o__ if th__at __little cow boy bugged me all the time._ Now ignoring Gokudera, she repeated to Yamamoto her question.

"Yeah, there's a girls' baseball club. There's a whole bunch of other girls' sports clubs too. Hey! I have an hour before practice after school ends. I can show you around." . I have twenty minutes before baseball practice after school. I can show you around all the clubs," he wrapped his arm over her shoulder, signifying he'd watch over her, then continued talking about how his father was buying new plasma TV for the sushi restaurant. Yuka let his arm stay around her—it didn't feel possessive. No, it felt comfortable.

In fact, here she was, already fitting in, a regular piece in the puzzle. Maybe she had always been normal enough for Namimori?

Yuka was out-going as a hungry duck. During the day, she made loads of new friends. She talked all about Midori and what it was like and asked about Namimori. Of course, she left out the significant detail that she had been a delinquent. With her glasses in place and her uniform inspected by Lal Mirch that morning, she appeared to be an immaculate bookworm and very well-put-together. Normality must always be a camouflage.

* * *

Midway through the day, Yuka met the Namimori head prefect, Hibari Kyoya. Their relationship could have been non-existent. Who knows? Yuka might have never got on Hibari's nerves. I could have lied to you in that good old summary and this might really be a Yamamoto x OC fic and not a Hibari x OC fic. I'm in control of this story, after all. More powerful than Mukuro. Hibari fics are much more in demand than any other type of story.

And I got you to read this far.

But I will not scam you. This is why I am letting Hibari and Yuka meet, even though she would be far happier with a stud like Yamamoto. Or even Ryohei. He has a nice body, you know.

Anyway...

Yuka was a happy hen surrounded by a gander of chattering girls. She heatedly discussed Midori, proclaiming its tyranny, but of course, left out her colorful delinquency. She couldn't emphasize enough how much she admired Namimori's liberal faculty and marveled over the after-school activities, like knitting club and cooking club, the girls told her about. Yuka was caught up in own excitement like a busy bee who had discovered a meadow of blooming flowers. When she had expected to be diving into cold water, warmth pleasantly surprised her. She had never had so much attention, and as a rather adorable, slightly geeky looking transfer student, many girls found her approachable and easy to talk to. The Namimori faculty had long given up trying to keep students in perfect line in between classes, and as the noise in the hall grew and grew, they shut their doors and occupied themselves with their own eccentricities.

Yuka's mind raced as she plotted about how to use this new identity to the greatest advantage. The tweak of a smirk appeared again as her hair bounced to her step. Attention, people... school supplies, she lost her coordination when an extremely heavy book landed in her arms. And then another, and another! Library club! She slipped while walking down the stairs. The books threw up into the air. She careened down the flight as if it were a slip 'n slide. Her fake glasses fell off at the bottom, and the fake lenses popped out because they were so cheap.

However, to her surprise, her landing wasn't that painful. No, it was quite soft. As the shock wore off like the settling of lightening, she found herself sitting on the stomach of a boy. A sleeve with a red and yellow armband poked out from between her legs. Yuka couldn't see his face because her foot had neatly landed on top of it.

The girls at the top of the staircase stopped, hushed, and then, slowly inched away.

Yuka quickly removed her foot. Her hand came up to her mouth as she peered down at the face she thought she had squashed, and perhaps, knocked out cold. She didn't want to offend anyone in this new world, and possibly, lose this beautiful spotlight she had attracted. Damn, it felt nice.

"Are you okay? Oh my gosh, I am so sorry." she sputtered, leaning over his face. She needed to show concern because she so wanted to remain liked. "Do you need to go to the nurses? I'll take you!" His silky hair, fanned out on the hallway floor, was trapped underneath her hand as she leaned over him. Yuka hurriedly wiped some of the dirt off his cheek with the edge of her sleeve, like when she was little and tried to glue together a broken vase.

"Get off," he cut in. His steel-grey eyes were narrowed.

_His eyes!_ They were pools of twinkling liquid metal. For that brief instant, she was hypnotized like a moth to a light. _This boy… wow… he's handsome… and he smells good, not like those thugs at Midori. _He smelled like pine trees, and to agree with another fan fiction author out that as of August 2012, goes by the pen Starleatta, green tea, and I'll just add, made from well water. (I give up on thinking of how Hibari smells, but for the purpose of this fic, I like to think he smells really good.) She looked down at his face amazed, her mouth dropping open a little.

"Just get off." Annoyed with her delay, the kid pushed her off so hard that her back painfully smacked the staircase behind her.

Yuka was slow to recover. Falling down the stairs, landing on a boy she had actually thought was a little cute, and then realizing, to her embarrassment, that he wasn't friendly like everyone else, was a brain overload of crazy shit going down. Having experienced all these emotions in less than 30 seconds, Yuka was, all in all, dumbfounded.

_Well... What the hell_, she thought, and her head wilted to the side.

The boy was standing now and he glared down at her. Yuka was no longer entranced. She didn't like the way his steely eyes studied her collapsed body on the staircase, nor the way he smirked in the corner of his mouth. He seemed to get a kick out of her situation. He flipped out a notepad and a pen.

"What's your name, herbivore?"

'_What's your name'?_ _What about an apology!'_ She picked herself up, but remained on the staircase so she could still be taller than him. She put one hand akimbo and the other she placed on the staircase railing. She had to keep her composure. It was just another typical wanted to explode on him, but restrained herself, thinking of her Aunt's warning. Auntie Lal already had a Midnight Punishment Training prepared for her that night. She didn't want to provoke her Aunt's parental wrath any further. In the end, she compromised, and so, she tried to reason with the boy.

"Don't you think you're being KIND of rude, I mean…" she began.

"Kusakabe, what's her name?" the he asked, looking over his shoulder. A delinquent with a funny haircut was the only one left in the halls.

"Her name is Hakuchou Yuka. She's a transfer student, Hibari-san." Kusakabe informed, using her new surname. He had a toothpick in his mouth, but had taken it out, concerned about the situation. "This is her first day."

Completely ignoring his assistant's merciful hint, Hibari continued to scribble in his notepad. "Double detention for reckless behavior, a bad attitude, and scuffing the floors. Detentions are at the Disciplinary Committee room after school. But since I have time... I'll bite you to death too."

He flipped his notepad shut, the black mop of silk now falling over his eyes. All she could make out was a sinister smirk slithering like a snake in the grass.

He launched himself at her. Instinct and reflex made her hand holding the staircase railing lever her to the side. His tonfa only met air. Yuka was now backed up against the railing. An opportunity was presented. Knee him in the stomach? But Auntie Lal's warning and the scars of previous Midnight Trainings once again popped into her head like moles with gravestone hats.

Instead, she swiveled off the staircase, relinquished her higher position, and put some space between her and the prefect._ That felt a touch like Salsa…._ She thought, for dance, she could admit, she liked learning at Midori. She had never moved herself like that before in a fight. Then again, she had never met a fighter her match.

However, she would later regret not taking that shot at his stomach. Hibari Kyoya, strongest of the Vongola guardians, had underestimated her because he thought her a typical athletic girl. He suspected she read romance novels all day and spied on guys like Yamamoto Takeshi, sighing with the windchimes. She was a girl after all. A girl with glasses. Why wouldn't he think her a weakling?

Hibari turned around, a flicker of resentment in his hard, iron eyes.

"Hibari Kyoya: Namimori Disciplinary Committee Head Prefect," Yuka dictated from his arm band in a lame drawl.

Irritated by her evasion, Hibari lifted up his tonfas. Yuka heard the little spikes protruded out of the black metal sticks, and took a step back and her palms lifted up. He looked her again in the eyes. "You're interesting… I won't miss this time." Hibari approached her again, but this time, much faster and much more aggressive.

Just barely side-stepping his first swing, she managed to lift her foot and slide off her left beige Namimori Uniform loafer. She put her hand inside the shoe as if it were a glove. _Tango… That move felt like Tango! _With her hand protected from the spikes, she managed to deflect Hibari's second tonfa. But the third swipe crashed into her stomach.

Breath knocked out, she was pinned against the lockers opposite the stairs. His right tonfa remained rammed into her stomach, while his left now grinded painfully against her shoulder. The girl was pinned. She had dropped her shoe, shocked by the blow, and it rested a couple feet away. Now, both her hands were occupied trying to push away the tonfa agonizingly cutting into her shoulder. What an awful mood this is for a romance, is it not?

"How resourceful?" He sneered, glancing at her shoe. "But what are you going to do now?"

"What are you mean what am I going to do? Get off."

"Aren't you being a little _rude?_"

Yuka seethed with anger. He treated her just like those Midori teachers. She was been chewing a winter-fresh stick. She spit it out hard and fast. The glob of gum struck the prefect's white dress-shirt. Hibari's thoughts surfaced on his face, and he obviously seemed to think the little stunt was pathetic. But the expression was interrupted with a new glint reflecting a sliver of violet.

"And what's this?" He turned the tonfa to lift her silver chain that carried her mother's jade ring.. With a quick flick of his stick, he snapped the thin silver necklace, caught the purple stone band, and stepped back. Yuka fell to her knees, clutching her bruised stomach as Hibari stowed his tonfas, removed the offending gum from his shirt, and flipped out his notepad. "Jewelry is prohibited. Prefect's confiscating this," he said, holding up the ring between his fingers. "That's another detention for violating the dress code, Yuka-chan."

"Give it back." Her grunt was low and quiet with the need to make him obey her. However, she still clutched her tummy, detracting from the threatening aura she wanted to convey. Still, she wasn't begging. She was demanding.

He just ignored her and walked away. "Go to class."

* * *

_YEAH RIGHT, AM I GOING TO HIS STUPID DETENTION._

Yuka needed to relax. Her face was red and she wanted to stick her head in the ground like an ostrich. She knew she couldn't go after him and reclaim her heirloom ring. Oh boy, did she want to, but alas, she could not summon power and destruction on par with Godzilla. Her stomach still hurt from his hit, and she was also worried someone would ask how she had managed to stick up for herself as long as she did. She sat in the back of the class, her glasses abandoned, her face down on her desk. She had to be smart in picking her battles. Lal Mirch had told her, time and time again, that her hot, defiant head was not a strength, but a weakness. She couldn't make stupid irrational decisions. She had to check herself.

She spent the rest of the day on the roof, hot, bothered, and in a hurry for the day to be over. Her mind was like a stormy ocean. She hadn't meditated in so long. But it was the only way she could restrain her urge to shout a declaration of war from the school roof. Who did he think he was? Furthermore, where the hell had the girls gone that, last period, followed her around like ducklings?

Energized, but still bitter, Yuka skipped detention without a second thought. She hadn't meditated since Mrs. Igarashi had ripped up her essay she had worked on for countless hours at the library to complete. (One of the few times she had actually tried hard in school.) It was on the sexism in their English textbook, '_A Young Lady's Guide to Romantic Literature.' _Was the prefect her destined replacement for Mrs. Igarashi, that old bat? Would there always be some evil school-patrolling prude to haunt her?

* * *

She hurried to meet Yamamoto in the courtyard. She looked tired and ready to call it a day. Yuka found the baseball player already wearing his uniform, orange clay painting one leg that had slid into a base. One of his bronze arms held a wooden baseball bat, while the other waved Yuka over. He grinned cheerfully at her. No wolfish grin. She liked that.

"Yuka, you ok? Where are your glasses."

"Oh? Yeah. I am…. Uhh, I decided I didn't like them."

"I heard you got on Hibari's bad side."

A ball dropped in her stomach. _Are the rumors travelling already?_

"Oh that? Hahahah," Yuka laughed nervously, creepily holding her hands together. "It's nothing to worry about. Ugh… Hibari and I just ugh had a umm… a little misunderstanding. Everything's fine now!" She smiled reassuringly to Yamamoto.

"Ahahah!, that's good to hear. Hibari's a pretty tough guy—wouldn't want to run into him in a dark alley. Good thing you got that worked out." He slapped her good-naturedly on the back. "So what club do you want me to show you first?"

Yamamoto's tour wasn't long because he had to go to baseball practice. On the way to the fields, Yamamoto pointed out the Dance Club practicing in the gym. Yuka's heart was set like concrete.

"What's the dance club like? I took some lessons back at Midori."

"Eh? I heard they're very talented. They won Nationals a couple years before I came here school."

"AH! Really?" She felt so at ease with this guy. She was beginning to forget the traumatic run in with the arrogant jerk-face. "I dance, but I've never thought about competing! How do I join?"

It would make wearing her disgustingly homogeneous uniform worth it if she could at least dance again. Namimori's colors were boring, dull, and bland like oatmeal without sugar. They constricted her soul. The news of a dance club lifted her spirits more than any of the schemes she had been plotting all day. Fantasies that included a certain prefect in some way, shape, or form, usually ending with him unconscious, or crying for mercy and with that stupid armband on her arm.

"Just go inside and talk to the captain. I gotta get going. Hey! Come to my game this Saturday! Cheer me on, ya know? It's an important one. Tsuna and Gokudera will be there too, so you won't be alone or anything." He flashed a dazzling smile. The boy definitely brushed his teeth.

"Sounds like fun! I've never been to a baseball game. I can't wait, Yamamoto-san!" Yuka shouted back, watching him sprint off.

"See you around!"

_That guy is really nice._ She smiled to herself, watching him stride out confidently into the expansive green field.

Then, unfolding her spare pair of horn-rimmed glasses and pushing them onto her nose, she strutted into the gym. This school may be the prefect's property, but the dance floor was hers.


	4. Her Territory, the Dance Floor

Her Territory, the Dance Floor

None of the dance club members could hold back a gasp of astonishment as they gawked at the infamous prefect leaning nonchalantly by the gym's entrance. _GO WITH HIM, NEWLY ELECTED CAPTAIN!_ They shouted using telepathy._ Doesn't she know who Hibari is? If she's a transfer student, maybe she doesn't know? _Whispers bounced throughout the crowd.

"You made a mistake. I'm not going to let you off," Hibari threatened coolly. "Don't think you'll skip detention again."

"Tsk. I have more important things to do than waste my time in detention." Yuka's eye's blazed and her stand-offish tone could freeze water. She quickly eyed the other girls, now threatening them to continue practicing. Hibari had no authority over her club's activities.

_As long as my team is here, I can't back down. They need to practice._

The prefect was unmoved by her audacity. His mouth was turned down in a disapproving frown and his cold eyes never left the newly-elected dance club captain. In his pocket was a photocopy of the Dance Club's updated roster. Only one name, circled in red pen, interested him. He scanned the gymnasium and the nervous dance team. They were all girls. "Are you herbivores crowding?" he growled.

Immediately, the Dance Club girls flooded out of the gym.

_FUCK. How can they just abandon me so easily?_

_

* * *

_

Yuka strutted into the gym, hoping the dance club would accept her as a new member. Excitement bubbled in her blood.

"You've taken dance lessons? Of course you can join!" an older girl exclaimed.

"Our senior captain broke her ankle at a dance rehearsal two weeks ago, and hasn't been able to come to practice," a timid first year explained. "She says she won't be able to dance until the end of the school year! We're not the team we used to be," she explained, motioning towards two girls waltzing awkwardly, stepping on each other's feet. "We've been practicing, but since she left us, we haven't learned anything new."

Yuka had thrived off of her dance classes in Midori. She knew Viennese Waltz and ballet, however her addiction lied with the Latin American Salsa and Tango. _But I don't know enough to teach..._

However, the girls wouldn't wipe off their puppy-dog eyes since she told them she's danced for 3 years.

"Take the deal. You can be our captain and everything," a girl with short black hair ordered. She had a very mature aura, and wore her uniform like an elite businesswoman wore a pant-suit. Yuka liked her immediately. Her name was Hana Kurokawa.

_Maybe it will be fun. I hope I'm good at it. _"Ok. I'll lead. I'll teach." She pulled a girls shoulder's back, showing her how to dance with a straight posture.

"But I can't stay long today." Yuka kept in mind Lal's Midnight Punishment Training. _I need to nap soon or else I'll feel worse than boiled dog poo tomorrow._

"Why are you playing the music so quietly? It's no fun like that!" Yuka laughed, turning up the stereo system. "Hmm. Sounds like a Foxtrot."

The girls knew pieces of Foxtrot, but seemed to have lost their poise over the past two weeks.

_Dancing is not going to be the same without some real boys in the group. This school is different. Maybe the boys here are more... polite._ Yuka cringed remembering her first time dancing with a boy.

After an hour, she said farewell, but the gymnasium was still a party. The Foxtrot music blasted, easily heard from the street, while some girls kept dancing after she left. Yuka's lesson had shed light on the mystery behind the Foxtrot.

* * *

For Midnight Punishment Training, Lal Mirch made Yuka scale a mountain in stilettos. Her Aunt didn't want her to look too beat up. She couldn't stand out in school. What would the children say if a 'bookworm' came to school with scratches and bruises? So her plan was to concentrate all the damage in Yuka's feet.

"If you can deal with this pain, then you can deal with any pain," Lal explained. "You must learn how to bear pain and suffering stoically."

The climb was torture. She used meditation techniques to help her ignore the pain as she trekked through rivers and scaled steep rocky slopes. She pretended her ankles were made of wood, and where the straps bit into her skin, she pretended her feet weren't hers. They were someone else's.

However, nothing could withdraw her from the dull throb. Nothing could shake of the agony entirely.

* * *

The next day, Tuesday, Yuka's feet were raw and blistered. Have you ever had raw and blistered feet from a nasty pair of shoes? Or when the back of your ballet flats digs into the back of your ankle, and with every step you take, the skin is more and more irritated. Nothing hurts more.

It took her a really long time to reach Namimori. Yuka could barely walk in her camel beige loafers. He knee-high socks bulged around her bandaged feet. When she got home, she had changed into her uniform and filled her socks with ointment. Still, with each step she took, she felt like she was going to collapse. Being on her feet hurt like hell. _And Lal Mirch said I wasn't going to stand out!_ She was lucky she could stand at all.

_Today's not going to be a good day._

No teachers stood outside Namimori gate to pick on late students. The school was already an hour and a half into the day, and she had a note of excuse from her Aunt. She checked in at the main office, and then went up to the roof to meditate. It was the only way she could ward off the pain from the blisters.

_I'll have to keep off my feet at Dance Club later, too. I'll have to teach from the benches…_

_

* * *

_

The silent, empty gym was unbearable. Hibari had chased out her club as if they were a flock of skittery sheep. He still leaned by the doorway, challenging her to submit to his detention. Yuka stood in the center of the hard-wood dance floor, arms crossed. She viciously chewed her classic bubble-gum flavored gumdrop. A piano and string waltz played on the stereo near the bleachers, the volume recently turned down upon the prefect's entrance.

"I have a note from my Aunt that excuses me from after school activities—"

"—except here you are at Dance Club. You look fine to me." The prefect's cool gaze looked her up and down. _Does he not see I can barely stand? _Her face flushed from his stare.

_Tsk. He's looking at me like I'm a piece of meat._ When guys stared at her like that, it freaked her out.

"If you're well enough to dance, then you're well enough to serve detention. We can do it in here."

_WHAT? NO! No. No. No. This is my place!_

"And if you don't serve the detention today, I'll disband the Dance Club. Heh," Hibari smirked, "I didn't know you were the captain. It figures." He crumpled up the new roster and tossed it into a nearby trashcan. "I had the disbandment paperwork drawn up yesterday because your noise was disturbing the peace." His metallic eyes narrowed at Yuka's simmering complexion. The poor girl was beet red with frustration.

"You wouldn't dare!"

"Are you _questioning_ my authority?" Hibari raised an eyebrow.

_God damnit. How can I get out of this?_ He did have the authority. He could take away her club. He had already chased them out of the gym with absolutely no resistance. _And he still has Mom's ring for ransom. Everyone's gone. There are no witnesses to report to Squalo that I'm hiding at Namimori, but there's no way I can fight him with so much pain in my feet._ Yuka had used self-hypnosis, combined with meditation, desperate to reduce the pain. God help her if she lost this state-of-mind.

"…I'll do the detention," Yuka reluctantly muttered. Immediately, she felt she had lost a part of herself she would **_never ever_** get back. She had never willingly submitted to detention in her life. Her pride drifted away as her eyes slightly clouded.

"Smart choice."

Hibari straightened and walked over to the stereo on the lowest bleacher. Yuka thought he was going to turn it off, but instead, he turned the volume knob up. Yuka caught her breath. The waltz's violins floated dreamily through the room, reaching for their crescendo. The mesmerizing music pushed the pain of her feet further out of her mind. The prefect turned around to face her, and held out his hand. His stare dared her to take it.

"You want me to dance?" _Mrs. Rushito never did this. She'd make me run laps or clean hallways, not something I liked…._

_Not something I actually liked._

"I enjoy the music." His glare grew more poisonous as she stalled.

_Maybe I can dance for a little bit. The pain isn't too bad anymore_. His scent enveloped her as she approached him, and oddly made her feel calmer. Why does he smell like... like pine needles and wet dirt? _Maybe I misjudged him…_ In a defining moment, she placed her hand in his.

The prefect pulled her towards him, smoothly placing his other hand on her back. Surprised that he knew how to dance, she gripped his jacket sleeved just below his red and yellow armband. He took the lead and she followed. It had been a while since she had last danced the waltz. The pain was not as bad as she had expected. _It's the dancing. I always feel better when I'm dancing, even when it's supposed to hurt._

_But_ _I feel rusty. He must notice. He's way better than me... _Yuka was too focused on keeping up with the dance footwork to notice Hibari's careful eye on her. Finally, he leaned down, breaking her concentration, and asked, "So, are you all bark and no bite?"

"What? What's that supposed to mean?"

"I thought you would impress me. Like yesterday."

"uh. Well, I uh…" _I like this detention. I like dancing with him._ "I don't know what you're talking about. I just don't want any trouble," she ended softly. Weakly.

"Heh, good." He smirked down at her. "Then don't get too cozy with your little club. I hate crowds."

Yuka's face reignited. _Is he threatening me again? He said he wouldn't take the Club away!_

"Hold on!"

She wanted to stop dancing and yell at him, but his lead was too strong. She tried dragging her feet, but he always managed to spin her to make her keep moving. _Have I lost control of my body? I can't stop the dance!_ His strong lead was making her feel sick. She could almost picture him smirking over her shoulder. He had her cornered with his grip around her waist. _The bastard must be enjoying this. _She felt she was in the same situation as yesterday. She might as well be pinned her against school lockers. Yuka kept trying to drag her feet. Her rage grew every time he managed to break her back into step. Into following his lead.

No pain was worth this humiliation.

"STOP! You can't disband us! I'm doing your stupid det—$&*&%%!%$$!"

He had stepped on her foot. Hard.

The pain was agonizing. It shot up Yuka's leg and made her entire body quiver and tense. Unconsciously, she squeezed her Hibari's hand and his prefect jacket sleeve, squishing he face into his shoulder and her body against his chest. Tears watered in her eyes, as she tried to remove her mind from the pain.

Just like that, the dance—the second dance she had ever had with a boy—was over.

"Get off," Hibari spoke softly into her ear.

She was almost there, the pain was almost gone. But it still hurt so much. Her body was frozen in agony. _How could he do that? How could he not notice I could barely walk? He freakin' danced with me! How can he not notice it in my step!_

"You…" Yuka quivered, "YOU motherfucken BASTARD!" Yuka screamed into his shoulder. She could feel her sock moisten. One of the blisters had popped and the fluid puffing it up was leaking out.

Hibari wrenched his hand from her tight squeeze, grabbed the front of her uniform collar, and ripped her off him. Clutching the fabric of her shirt, he practically lifted her off the ground to force her to look into his irritated granite eyes. His cheeks were touched with the faintest bit of red from the insult. Or was it something else?

"What did you just call me?"

Looking him in the face turned Yuka's pain into white hot rage. Tears rain hot down her cheeks.

_How dare he!_

*RRRIIIIIIPPPPPPPPPPPP* With the hand that once gripped Hibari's sleeve, Yuka dangled the torn red and yellow prefect armband between both their noses. Then, testily, she spit her gum in it, crumpled it up and threw in over her shoulder.

"Yuh get the message?" Her face betrayed all her absolute disgust with him, her cheeks still wet. Her hand wrapped around his fist, trying pry her shirt loose.

"You're pathetic. I barely touched you."

"Let me go." Right on cue, a drop of blood dripped from her shoe to the floor. Yuka didn't notice, caught up in her fury, but Hibari did.

A little surprised, he let go of her shirt collar. The pain on her feet from being dropped caused Yuka to collapse. She winced as she hit the floor. Immediately, she wrestled her shoes and socks off to reveal wads of bandages. Blood soaked through the one _he_ had stepped on.

Just looking at her damaged foot made her want to break out into tears again. _No one has **ever** gotten away with treating me like this…. _But no matter how much she wanted to glare poison at the prefect towering above her, she had to fix her blister. No scar from this day would ever taint her body.

Hibari quietly studied her injury from his height. He'd never seen such tortured feet. His jaw clenched and his hands squeezed into fists, but Yuka was too focused on her wounds to notice. Then, he ripped his gaze off Yuka to rest on the boom box, still playing its hypnotizing waltz.

She was finally distracted from her poor foot when Hibari smashed the stereo system with his metal Tonfa.

"What the hell! Why'd you do that?" She gawked at the broken boom box. The plastic shell was cracked and the tape's film lay around it in a tangled mess.

"You have two more detentions. If you forget them again, I'll disband your Club." He shot Yuka one last steely look-over, and left her debating if it would be worth the pain to shove her foot up his ass.

* * *

Outside, he met with Kusakabe, his Assistant Head Prefect.

"I have the paper work for disbanding the Dance Club ready, Kyoya-san. All that's needed is your signature."

Of course, Kusakabe had watched Yuka's detention. He had seen Hibari dance, but refused to ask, no matter how much his curiosity begged him. In fact, he hadn't even known Hibari could dance.

And why was Hibari so involved with this new transfer student? Had he missed something?

"Sir, why don't you let a teacher handle Yuka-chan's detentions?"

Hibari looked irked by his subordinate's question, but answered nonetheless.

"She's interesting. I want to see her again." Kusakabe's worry increased ten-fold. Hibari had never been interested in anything but his enemies and preserving the discipline of Namimori Middle School. How could a girl interest him?

_Does this mean Yuka-chan is an enemy?_ Kusakabe cringed at the idea, but as he thought over the scene in the gym, he remembered that Yuka's injury had caught him completely by surprise. He thought she danced very well, like someone who ought to be on television.

She hadn't betrayed a hint of pain before Hibari stepped on her foot. And only his boss had that much self-control. _If she's anything like Hibari, then she's a real threat._

"How did you read her foot was hurt?" Kusakabe was very familiar with his boss's ability to spot the weakness in the opponent. Hibari must have noticed her injury and used it against her.

"I never detected her injury." His boss looked to be in deep thought as he departed. Hibari took of his coat and slung it over his shoulder, his white dress-shirt flapping in the late afternoon breeze. He seemed to be in a bad mood, his tone of voice sharper, bossier. "Leave the paperwork on my desk," he ordered over his shoulder as he began his meditative afternoon rounds to guard his beloved school.


	5. Amending the Constitution

Amending the Constitution

"Ugh! Is that a mosquito?"

"Why yes, little lady," grinned Dr. Shamal, who personally suffered from drool-over-teenage-girls syndrome. He was holding a plastic capsule with a mosquito vibrating inside, eager to be released. "Now hold still while your dear doctor makes you all better!"

Dr. Shamal leaned in, trying to play it smooth. Yuka didn't have to be disgusted—her Aunt was disgusted enough for the both of them. Lal Mirch pulled Dr. Shamal away from her by the collar of his white lab coat, and they began their usual bickering.

Lal Mirch had brought her to the doctor's office after school to tend to her blistered feet. Yuka was still in a bad mood from her encounter with the prefect in the gymnasium. Shamal was smearing a weird, funky smelling green ointment on her feet.

"Auntie?" Yuka's whine complimented Dr. Shamal's cheesiness "Why couldn't I have skipped school to see a doctor?" _I could have completely avoided that asshole Hibari at school? _Yuka then whispered, "And why did you get _this_ doctor?"

"First off, it would be suspicious if you missed school. Secondly, even though Dr. Shamal is unprofessional, he has his uses," her aunt replied coldly, brusquely. She had just gotten off of work.

"Ahem," Dr. Shamal cleared his throat. "You know, Lal, baby, it's been a long time since you were my patient—"

"I have no need of your services." Shamal was SHUT DOWN. His mopey face looked like a monkey's deprived of a banana.

"Okay then, uh, well then, all business as always." Shamal turned back to Yuka, his enthusiasm returning. "Lal Mirch asked me to prepare a few of my trident mosquitoes containing an amnesia-inducing sedative." Shamal handed her a box containing several glass capsules. "They can tranquilize a charging elephant," he informed with a seductive wink.

"Amnesia-inducing drug…" Yuka repeated to herself before she turned angrily to Lal Mirch. "Do you not trust me at school? I promised I wouldn't cause a scene! You want me to brainwash everyone I meet?"

"I don't want to take any chances." Lal simply stated, closing her eyes. _Auntie Lal doesn't have any faith in my ability to beat Squalo…_.

Shamal put the pills in Yuka's hand, making her take them, making her hold them. He wrapped his hands around hers, a serious look in his eye. "Varia is a dangerous group, Yuka. Tsuna and his guardians had a lot of trouble with them." The doctor released her hands, and removed his examination gloves, dirtied with green ointment. "Reborn is using all his connections within Vongola to pull the Varia off you, but they are refusing to cooperate."

"But LAL! This?" She held out the capsules. "This is outrageous! Sedatives? I don't need this. I can take care of myself. You're so overprotective! I REALLY can take care of myself! SERIOUSLY! "

Ignoring Yuka's outrage, Lal Mirch turned to Dr. Shamal. "Hand it over."

"LAL! LISTEN TO ME! I want to go back to Midori. I want to be myself again!" Yuka continued, despite her Aunt's cold shoulder.

"Haha. Don't be so rude Lal! Your sister entrusted it to me—"

"God knows why!" Lal Mirch rolled her eyes while Shamal took out what looked like a violet-handled switchblade, or pocket knife, from his lab coat.

Yuka, still annoyed by her aunt's attitude, was attracted by its mysterious purple sheen. "Lal, what is that?"

"Are you done complaining?"

"...Fine, I'll stop," Yuka returned, angrily popping a bubble of Watermelon Blast gum. She chewed with every part of her that wanted to smash the sedatives on the floor and stomp out.

"This is your mother's weapon." Lal took it from Shamal, examining it to make sure it was real. "She used it when she was in the… uh… the Mafia."

Dr. Shamal added, "It's a Swiss Army knife that Verde altered." Lal Mirch held it out to Yuka, satisfied with its authenticity. It was cool to touch. Yuka thought it would be heavy, but felt as light as a plastic spork in her palm.

"Verde?"

"He was a good friend of hers…" her Aunt reminisced. Dr. Shamal and Lal Mirch became very quiet as they watched the girl handle the weapon.

Yuka curiously flicked the blade out. It was made of the same purple jade of mother's ring. Just holding it made her feel better. Happier. More at peace. Hibari? Who's he? She flicked it again and the blade switched to a sort of lock pick. Her Aunt took it away before she could find out what else was stored within the handle.

Lal Mirch had suddenly awakened. "It's not a toy. You can train with it, but you can't carry it around with you, _especially to school_," said Lal.

"Why can't I take it to school?" _I need it the most there! That Goddamn prefect won't get off my back._

"Because you don't _need_ it for school."

* * *

"WHAT DO YOU MEAN SHE GOT AWAY!"

The failure of mission 'get me a fucken' replacement cloud guardian' did not go over very well with Xanxus. Xanxus, as the leader of the Varia Assassination Team, had been in a foul mood ever since he lost the Vongola Succession fight to Tsuna. "Goddamnit. CAN'T ANY OF YOU PIECES OF TRASH DO ANYTHING RIGHT! YOU'RE ALL TRASH!" A vintage wine bottle whizzed past Squalo's left cheek, signifying he was to take the blame for the failed mission.

"VOOIIII! IITS NOT MY FAULT! REBORN INTERFERED!" Squalo shouted back. His hair was still a mottled pink from Yuka's kool aid bomb and the odor of strawberries wafted around him.

"MMMMMM! SQUALOOO! YOU SMELL LIKE A POPSICLE!" Lussuria chimed. Squalo mashed his teeth together and shouted back "VOOOIII! SHUT UP LUSSURIA!"

"She's a goddamn fifteen year old girl! She hasn't even been trained yet!" Xanxus continued, ignoring his two subordinate's antics.

Lussuria piped in. "BOSS Don't worry! I've set up surveillance and espionage network in all the local Namimori schools. We'll capture her if she turns up." Lussuria was trying to be reassuring. "Nothing can suppress our little cloud."

"VOIIIII DON'T SAY THAT AS IF YOU SET UP THE ENTIRE SURVEILLANCE SYSTEM BY YOURSELF!" Squalo pulled out his sword and pointed it at Lussuria.

"Shishishi~ Old cloud guardian's daughter tougher than you predicted Mammon." Mammon crossed his arms. "Hmph, I don't get paid enough."

Ending the meeting on the usual threatening note, "If you useless shitheads DON'T get this girl soon, you're all DEAD. TRASH! Now, GET OUT, NOW!"

"SQUALO? Why do we have to get _this_ girl to be the replacement cloud guardian?" asked Lussuria in his sing-song voice.

"VOIIII ARE YOU AN IDIOT! SHE'S THE DAUGHTER OF THE LEGENDARY VARIA ASSASSIN KALI MIRCH!" Squalo whirled his head around to whack Lussuria. "OH! Squalo, don't be like this!" As his head turned, his long hair flew through the air, strengthening his aroma of strawberry-ness. It could be a new attack—the wonderful smell left Lussuria paralyzed with a craving for a giant pitcher of red kool aid that smiled at him while jumping on a trampoline.

* * *

Dr. Shamal's medicine healed Yuka's feet overnight. Good stuff. The side effects made her chuckle all night long.

So on Wednesday morning, she walked to school pain-free, blister free, a happy-horsey trot. Her body felt amazing. But her mind was somewhere else. After yesterday's traumatic detention, Yuka was plagued with worry. She wished she could skip school, but alas, no genie would appear.

_What am I going to do about that prefect? I have to do another detention today with him, but I don't want to gooooooo… _Yuka whined to herself, kicking a pebble. But then, she realized, who was he to make her hate school?

_No, I WANT TO GIVE THAT BASTARD A PIECE OF MY MIND! Disband my club? Who the hell does he think he is?_ She would give the world to see his feet cemented to the moon. Yet again, the genie failed to appear in a puff of indigo smoke.

_I don't want to deal with him_. _Maybe I'll just go to the stupid detention and get it over with…. At least then, he'll leave the dancing club in peace._ His threat to disband the Dance Club worried her the most. Absent-mindedly, she played with her silver chain that used to hold her mother's ring.

She didn't know what to think anymore...

_But if he hates my Dance Club, why did he dance with me? _She remembered taking his hand when he asked her to dance._ I really thought it would be different. It felt like he was actually flirting with me. Goddamn him and his... his smooth skin... His hands were soft... and strong... _Now that she thought about it, his body language did not fit what he said to her.

Yuka halted in her tracks, paling. What was she thinking?

_NO! He IS a sadist. That's why he stomped on my injured foot._

She rubbed her head, squinting at the rising sun. Maybe it was Shamal's meds.

_

* * *

_

She turned the corner and bumped into Hana Kurokawa, from Dance club, Sasagawa Ryohei, the Sun Guardian whom she met at the Vongola party, and his little sister, Kyoko.

"Yuka, are you ok?" A look of concern etched Hana's face. "What did the prefect do? Did you know he's the head of the disciplinary committee?"

"I know who he is…" _Wait, if they think I stood up to Hibari knowing he's the Prefect, then I'll stand out. Damn. This is so cowardly._ "But I didn't know then. Now I know, I mean. He, uh, he made that clear to me, yesterday."

"Oh, that's good. We all thought you were crazy or something." Yuka laughed along with her nervously.

If only they knew Yuka was crazier than a mad cow on red bull.

"YUKA-CHAN. DO YOU WANT TO JOIN THE BOXING CLUB TO THE EXTREME!" Ryohei asked. He punched an invisible enemy several times as he said this while, of course, jogging in place. Ryohei was captain of the Boxing Club.

Before Yuka could reject him, like most fanfic OCs do, a little scheme popped into her head.

"Uh, how many boys are in the boxing club, Ryohei?"

"ABOUT TWENTY. ITS AN EXTREME NUMBER!" Ryohei informed.

Yuka smiled to herself. _That's about as many girls I have in the Dance Club. PERFECT!_

"Ryohei, I'll join your club if you do me a favor. It's nothing much." She smirked coyly, ruffling his white lawn hair. "Would you bring your boys to my dance club to be partners with the girls? They don't get to practice with boys very often." Yuka figured the best kinds of boys to dance with were the ones SHE asked.

"I DON'T KNOW. IS DANCING EXTREME?" Ryohei asked.

To demonstrate, Yuka jumped in front of Ryohei and performed the most complicated Salsa strut she knew.

Kyoko giggle. "Yuka's is as into dancing as my brother is into boxing," she observed to Hana.

"WHOA! YOUR FOOTWORK IS EXTREME! YOU COULD BE A GREAT BOXER!"

"If your boys came to my Dance Club, I'll teach them my footwork."

"IT'S A DEAL TO THE EXTREME!"

"Awesome! Bring your club over this afternoon. We practice in the gym."

"WE DON'T MEET ON WEDNESDAYS. WE TAKE THE DAY OFF TO LET OUR MUSCLES HEAL TO THE EXTREME! HOW ABOUT TOMORROW?"

"That works for me. We practice every day. I'll see you Thursday then."

* * *

"Hana, since I _have_ to go to detention this afternoon," Yuka groaned, "I made a list of exercises for the dance club to do for today's practice." Yuka removed a couple of papers with purple scribbles all over them. Her left ear held a purple pen and her left hand held a calculator. Math class was almost over and the teacher had denoted the last five minutes to get a head start on homework.

"The girls on the team are all so scrawny and weak looking. Dancers need to be in good shape, you know." Yuka made a muscle to demonstrate, but it wasn't THAT big. She looked at it for a second with disappointment. "Never mind... Anyway, Ryohei's boxing club will be practicing with us tomorrow. The girls need to become stronger. Athletes aren't dainty dancers. And when they're new, they tend to step on feet." _Bad memories._ She handed her scribbled notes to Hana.

"Sure, I can take care of this. But Yuka, aren't you worried about the detention?" Hana asked suspiciously, lifting an eyebrow.

_Man, I shouldn't act so cocky! He obviously scares everyone shitless… Maybe I can play dumb again._

"Uh… should I be? It's just a detention," Yuka replied, putting on a more worried face.

"Well, detention isn't the worst punishment Hibari's given. If you get him really angry, well, I've heard stories that he almost murdered this kid who vandalized school property. The kid was in the hospital for a month!"

"But what does he do for detentions?" Yuka asked. _The room is probably filled with a bunch of sweaty, greasy punks who are too wimpy for him to fight._ Yuka was revolted at the thought of sitting next to a pervert with a ripped up shirt, smelling overwhelmingly of cologne, and finally began to dread the looming detention.

"Well, actually, he's never given anyone a detention before…. He's always just beaten them up. And he's only given warnings to girls. "Hana took out took out a little black notebook. "The Disciplinary Committee's Constitution dictates what punishments are given to boys and girls. It's easier on girls. It strictest punishment for us is a detention." Yuka looked curiously at the notebook.

"What's that?"

"Ah? My little black book. For my observations of other people. It helps when you're on the student committee."

"And the prefect?"

_"_Most of my information comes from gossip, carefully researched gossip, so I know very little about him," Hana answered, obviously annoyed with herself. "He's pretty much a loner. He avoids crowds any chance he gets. And no girl wants to know what his detentions are like."

Hana's tone made Yuka shiver. "What? What is this? A ghost story? It's probably just a regular detention," she declared, trying to brush off her insecurity.

"Nnn. I knew you wouldn't be fazed." Hana's mouth tilted upwards in a satisfied smirk. "You're a lot tougher than you look, you know," pointing to Yuka's glasses. "Not many people have the guts to stand up to Hibari, even when they don't know he is the school's prefect. Maybe that's why he's attracted to you."

Hana had found her out! Would she have to use a mosquito? She couldn't, not on Hana. It depends. Yuka eyed Hana's black book. _Maybe if I can just get my hands on that book, I can keep any stories from spreading. _Hana was a nice person, but she was too sharp.

"Still," Hana persisted, "It's odd Hibari gave you a detention. He's never dished one out before. Heh, _I think he'll confess to you_." Hana winked and nudged Yuka in the ribs, making her jerk.

"PSHHHH! HAHAHA I'm ticklish!" Yuka giggled. "And besides, he is _so_ not like that."

"Still, that guy has never even talked to another girl, Yuka. It's weird. For whatever reason he's interested in you… just be on your guard, ok?"

_What is Hana suggesting?_

_Is that why Hibari got on my case? Is that why he danced with me? He's interested in me?_

_But he gave me a detention as opposed to fighting me. It only proves he think me a weak little girl. Is this supposed to be chivalry? No—He doesn't show me one ounce of respect for me. Chivalry my ass._

"Well, I don't think he likes me," Yuka says, interrupting Hana. _And I don't want to be anywhere near him._

"Oh, I don't think he likes you, either, but he still is _into_ you. Like I said, you're the first girl he _ever talked to_."

The bell rung and the two girls said their good-byes. As they headed to their lockers, Yuka organized her thoughts and contemplated how to get out of the detention, while Hana organized Yuka's workout schedule and contemplated what it would feel like to do 500 push-ups.

* * *

_He told me to go to the Reception Room…_

Yuka hadn't thought up an excuse that could get her out of detention without putting the future of the Dance Club at stake. She was never one to use excuses anyway, just skip. She just shrugged when the teacher confronted her.

_Detentions are only an hour._

_I can get through this._

_I can get through this._

But even her meditation chant didn't make her feel any better about the situation.

In the reception room, the Head Prefect sat at his massive mahogany desk writing on a legal pad. His prefect jacket was draped carefully over the arm of his chair. She noticed the writing was smooth and elegant.

And briefly she was captured by the cute way his tussled black hair tickled his cheeks. By the way he propped his head up with one hand, eyes half open, rushing through Kanji. By that familiar smell of pine trees, now overpowering in this very room.

But she checked herself. _He's nothing but a sadistic bastard who wants to see me in pain. That's it! That's all he is._

On the far side of the room, Kusakabe was leading a Disciplinary Committee Meeting, informing the gathered prefects of new rules and policy changes.

Yuka was jealous of their hairdos. _I used to have crazy-cool hair like that…_

Hibari looked up as she approached his desk. Kusakabe also stopped his speech, surprised that someone outside the Committee was in the reception room.

He set his pen down with a clink on the table. The shades were drawn, but she could tell he was smirking through the dim light. "Are you ready to repent?" The anticipation in his face caused Yuka to hesitate. _Was he really looking forward to this?_

"For what? I did nothing to you," she countered.

Hibari pulled out a small ball of scarlet red fabric from his desk drawer and tossed it to her.

"Fix it," he ordered coolly. She unwrapped the ripped prefect armband, gum removed. A spool of thread and a needle were at the center of the bundle.

"Uh, I don't know how to sew," Yuka said uncertainly. _Just because I'm a girl…._

"Then learn. When you're finished, water the plants," he continued, pointing to a corner of the room consumed by potted trees and flowers. She hadn't noticed the garden coming in, but the nook looked like a shrine to nature. _What's wrong with me! Why didn't I notice that! _Pieces of nature always stood out to her.

"How are your feet?" he asked bluntly, leaning back in his chair as he looked her over.

"What do you mean 'how are my feet?' They're better!"

"I want to see. Take off your shoes."

"This is a detention. I don't have to take off _anything_," she growled back, softly, to muffle her tone from the other Disciplinary Committee members.

He studied her for a moment longer, still leaning back in his chair, his smoky-gray eyes slightly furrowed.

She glared back at him. She refused to feel exposed under his scrutiny.

"Tsk, have it your way," he finally said.

"Get to work and don't bother me." He returned to his legal pad, thus signaling for Yuka to get started on her assignment.

_Well at least I don't have to sit bored next to some smelly punk._ She decided to go to the Sewing Club. Kyoko was there. Maybe she would help.

* * *

"Kyoko? She left school early with her brother," one of the sewing club girls told her. "Why are you looking for her? Do you want to join our club? You're the new transfer student, right?"

"Uhh, yeah, I am. I don't want to join, thought. I just needed to ask her something."

She didn't need this. One look at the ripped armband would arouse suspicion.

_Damn. I have to sew it myself._

Midori taught sewing, embroidery, knitting, and all those other chores that go along with being their definition of the perfect wife. She always wanted to sew. She dreamed of designing her own outfits and making adjustments to her uniform. Her teachers thought she did messy work on purpose, but, to her disappointment, she really did have no sense with a needle.

* * *

Having finished stitching the armband, now a messy knot of red thread, she slipped it with the needle and thread into the waistband of her skirt.

Stupid skirts. No pockets.

_Now, to water the plants._

Hibari was no longer in the reception room. However, he prefects were still discussing new policies. Kusakabe's eyes carefully followed her to the water pot.

As she had to squeeze past the group of boys to reach the nature shrine, she overheard snippets of the meeting's conversation.

"I don't see what the point of this is. We never even used the first policy. Why change it now?" one of the prefects a protested.

"These are orders from the Hibari, not from the Principal. I can't argue with him on this one. He seemed pretty determined to get it passed, too." Kusakabe explained.

"When will the policy change be official?" another prefect asked.

"Hibari's working on the paperwork now. As soon as he passes in the edited constitution to the main office, I guess," Kusakabe informed.

_I didn't know the Disciplinary Committee was so bureaucratic._ She'd never thought she'd see a bunch of punk prefects talking like lawyers and politicians. _Impressive. And I just thought they were an army of goons and bullies._

Yuka grabbed the watering pot off the side table. It was a massive green piece of polyethylene plastic. (A/N: The stuff detergent bottles are made from. It's very hard.) It was about the size of the one of those huge laser jet printers. Or a medieval shield. It was already filled to the brim with water, and was very heavy and difficult to carry. She lugged it to the remarkable collection of plants and began the chore.

She noticed on each of the pots, there was a piece of labeling tape that said "Tree-Planting Committee." _Yamamoto didn't show me that club. I wonder what happened to it. _Holding the watering pot hurt her fingers, but as she drenched each plant's pot, it became easier and easier to wield.

Yuka was so busy concentrating on watering the plants, you know, the interesting way the water pooled in the dirt. She didn't notice Kusakabe and the other prefects suddenly fall silent and aloof. Nor did she notice chilling aura that grew behind her. Nope, she didn't notice Hibari until she he was right beside her, when she felt the sleeve of the jacket cloaking his shoulders brush her arm.

She tilted the pot so that it wasn't dripping water onto the floor, and faced him. Her amethyst eyes locked his fiercely.

Hers were the first to drift down.

"This is detention. Why are your tonfas out?"


	6. Hibari's Glare Softens

Hibari's Glare Softens

Hibari's unabashed closeness was unsettling. The Head Prefect's eyes betrayed a mad glint, but otherwise, his expression was fathomless and unreadable. Caught off guard, Yuka shifted her weight uneasily. _Suffocated. I feel suffocated._

However, Yuka wasn't about to let him intimidate her that easily. She pushed her spectacles further up her nose.

"What's going on?" she huffed. "Can't you see I haven't finished watering the plants?" Her tone reeked of bold insolence and sarcasm. She pointed to the plants. There were only seven, barely a job that needed to be done. Meanwhile, the Disciplinary Committee members stared at her like they were watching their cell phones drop into a port-o-potty. What utter astonishment!

"You do jokes, too?" Hibari mocked, smiling evilly and his eyes locking into hers. "Give me my armband."

_MAKE ME!_ She seemed to shout with her sharp violent eyes. But, it wasn't the time or place for raised voices. _I have to be careful of how I behave. If the Disciplinary Committee saw the real me, my cover will be blown. But that doesn't mean I have to act like some servile maid!_

She quickly scooped the gnarled armband from her skirt waistband and held it out to the Head prefect. It was now a mass of red thread, tangled beyond recognition.

"Don't say I didn't warn you," she explained with a hint of sass. He carefully took it from her and examined it closer.

For once in her life, she was proud that she sewed like a witchdoctor torturing a voodoo doll. It was in better condition _before_ he gave it to her. Hibari clenched his teeth and he crushed the armband in his balled fist. His calm demeanor barely masked his irritation. The disciplinary committee watched the prefect badge switch hands, as if they were watching a tennis match. Their eyes followed the exchange.

Hibari stuffed it into his pocket. Then, with two hooked fingers, he loosened his uniform's necktie.

"_Intolerable_. I've decided to bite you to death."

Suddenly, his tonfa lashed out at her shoulder. Yuka dared not block. The disciplinary committee punks, with their gravity-defying hairstyles, had their eyes glued to her.

So she took the hit, feeling stupid as she crashed into one of the larger plants, a shrub with odd thin purple leaves. "Nnn" she grunted. She really could have avoided it. Still, she had some brains. Yuka tactfully used the watering pot to cushion her fall.

However, what difference would it make if the odd leaves were actually thorns.

"What's wrong with you? I thought this was a detention?" she hissed, wincing. _I can't believe this guy!_ She carefully removed a stick of bristling thorns from her hair. Oh, boy, did she want to give him a piece of her mind. What right did he have to do that?

"You weren't taking me seriously, so I changed the punishment. Detention's over." Hibari was leaning over her, making her squeeze deeper into the shrub despite the pricks.

"I thought you would fight back, Ms. Woof-Woof," he taunted, his lips tilting playfully upwards and amusement flickering through his eyes. Yuka's horn-rimmed glasses were crooked on her ears, disturbed by her fall into the bush, and she had reddened from the surprise attack.

"Stop it—I actually _can't_ fight back," she seethed quietly in reply. For a moment, hesitation conquered Hibari's features, allowing Yuka to slip past him and scramble out of the thorny leaves. She scooted onto the ground scratched, but not bleeding. The plastic watering pot had shielded her from most of the thorns.

Yuka took off her glasses and hung them from her uniform's collar.

They were in the way now.

Sitting on the floor next to the potted plant, she rubbed her scrapes and fixed her short disheveled hair. She glowered up at the prefect.

"What are you talking about? Your feet are fine," he said, recollecting himself. His tonfas were lowered to his sides, but he still gave her a piercing look. "Heh. I see how it is. I hate weak herbivores."

"You know, I would actually relish the opportunity," she began, furiously springing up. Hibari had to lean away or else the top of her head would have smacked his jaw. But he wouldn't get away that easy. She grabbed the collar of his white uniform dress shirt and pulled him close to her face. Pulled him close in the same way so many punks thought they could with her, faces lit up with their arrogant smirks and sexist wiles.

"Make them leave," she whispered almost inaudibly. She nodded to the now bug-eyed Disciplinary Committee to clarify. Hibari scowled and made to hit her off, but Yuka relinquished. She didn't need the bruise.

Released, Hibari closed his eyes in understanding. She was thankful. She was thankful? Yes, she might have the opportunity now to remove this parasite from her back without any witnesses getting in the way. Without any witnesses reporting to Varia.

Hibari turned to eye the Disciplinary Committee members, who had completely forgotten themselves. They blinked profusely as realization struck them.

"I don't like crowding," Hibari said frowning, and the room cleared in an instant.

_We're finally alone. That means… That means I can do whatever I want…._ Just like that, a wall within Yuka's mind, a wall built on the fear of Lal Mirch's horrific warnings, disintegrated.

She was free.

She was finally free.

Immediately, Yuka snatched and hoisted the gigantic watering pot, still half full of water, above her head. The prefect was still watching, with satisfaction, the last of his minions leave. Before he could turn around, she drenched him thoroughly with dirty plant water. Tonfas block kicks and punches, but are useless against two gallons of H-2-O. Water cascaded down his clothed form. Burning, she waited for him to brush his dripping wet hair out of his face.

But he didn't bother. Instead, his jacket dropped off his shoulders, soaking wet, onto the floor.

Hibari's steely orbs turned to Yuka's, water saturating his dark strands. Their eyes clashed like rumbling thunder, cold steel against purple iron. Both flamed with vehemence. She irradiated him beyond belief. He had humiliated her, blackmailed her, and withheld her mother's ring from her far too long. All restraint was gone.

"Hey," he began in a dark voice, "can I kill you?"

"By all means," Yuka answered, "try."

_I need to get this out of my system._

He lunged. He moved so fast, she forgot to breath. _Incredible._ Still, her agility could keep up, her steps backwards being nimble and careful. And oh! The adrenaline. She had missed it. Lal Mirch's trainings could not arouse her as much as she was now.

The first two swings she dodged, twisting her body in graceful pirouettes. The third she blocked using the hard watering pot as a shield, halting in her spin. The blow was extraordinary, causing the entire piece of plastic to vibrate.

Both of them paused, frozen, eyes meeting in acknowledgment that neither was about to be taken down easily. Hibari broke their gaze first, taking another swing at her unprotected head. However, with a little trick of the neck, she ducked and retaliated with a crouching, sweeping kick from the floor. He jumped backwards to evade, putting distance between them.

Both paused and breathed heavily from the exertion.

"So this is the real you," he finally said, his eyes flickering with curiosity.

"What of it?" she retorted curtly.

But he didn't answer. He just smirked, taking a fighting stance. He lifted his left tonfa, holding it parallel to the ground. Yuka heard it click, watching his smile grow wider. _The spikes._ "Let's see how much you can handle."

He attacked again, but this time, much, much faster. All movement felt like a blur, and Yuka barely had enough time to react. Barely had enough time to think. Barely had enough time to breath. _The bastard was holding back!_ But Yuka, too, was drunk off of the adrenaline coursing through her bloodstream. Too in the moment. Too busy. It didn't matter that he was holding back.

It had been a long time since she was in a real fight. Too long.

The reception room transformed into a battleground. In and out, they weaved between meeting tables and chairs, parrying and blocking and dodging. They jumped on desks and over the sofas, using the obstacles around the room in an attempt to trip each other. To befuddle each other. Her footwork was tested in these close-quarters. Tango came especially in handy, with its quirky hip movements. This clash with Hibari didn't feel like a street brawl.

It felt like a dance. And that same feeling, that same wonderful blissful feeling enveloped her. And even though Hibari seemed to disguise it with bloodlust, but she could tell: he was enjoying it just as much as her.

The same adrenaline.

The same rush.

The same bliss.

And for some reason, it just didn't feel like he really wanted to hurt her.

So the fight wore on. Hibari seemed shocked every time she landed a punch or a kick. His eyes would widen, and he would back off for a few seconds, as if to reorient himself. However, her blows were much weaker than his. He was, by far, her superior in strength.

Still, she was an artist in evasion. He only got two serious hits on her:

The first, he had cornered her behind his desk, managing to knock her in the ribs. Yuka did her best to hide the cringe, falling back to waltz through the isle between the coffee table and sofa. But he quickly caught up, grazing her arm, leaving a scratch from the spikes. He obviously knew the waltz too well. She had to be careful because every swipe he landed slowed her down.

Finally, Yuka noticed a pattern to Hibari's fighting style. _His second swing is from the bottom to top, like a punch. _She began to sketch a trap in her mind. It felt like designing choreography.

Carefully, she faked taking a hit that really only tore the hem of her skirt. Hibari, thinking he'd figure her out, swiped again, in the same way she had predicted.

And just like that, she caught his entire arm within the gaping hole of her now beloved green plastic watering pot. She praised it lovingly in her mind. Latching the end of his tonfa to the inside of the spigot, she yanked him closer to her. Hibari's eyes widened. He couldn't evade it—a sharp kick to the gut. Hibari's left tonfa was ripped from his grip, remaining inside the watering pot, while he staggered backwards a couple steps.

Their rhythm was broken. Both huffed and panted, catching their breath, and let their exhaustion settle. His eyes lingered on the pot as she pulled out his captured weapon. It was no longer covered in spikes. She glanced over it, and then returned the prefect's glare. His unscathed appearance aggravated her. _How can I damage him with a blunt watering pot?_ In comparison, her uniform was almost in tatters.

His stoic reaction to her brilliant strategy ruffled her feathers further. _He looks like he barely felt that kick! If only I were wearing heels. Then he'd be clutching his gut!_

Yuka cast the trusty watering pot to the side and wielded Hibari's tonfa in mimicry of the prefect before her.

_I don't know how to use this weapon, but it's made of metal. It's definitely an upgrade._ The steel handle was still warm from her opponent's grip. The tonfa itself was lightweight, but felt awkward to use, not being something she held in front of her, but more on her side. Her eyes darted back to Hibari suspiciously.

"What?" she challenged, "Aren't you worried now that I actually have a _real_ weapon?" She grinned maliciously.

_We're even now. I got this._

Hibari's eyes had rested on Yuka as she equipped his tonfa—HIS tonfa, mind you. Yuka mistook it for jealousy. For irritation.

But his eyes rested on _her_—her skirt, her white uniform shirt. All torn from where his spike had not managed to scrape her. The pink hue in her face from the exercise. The circulation. The adrenaline. It was admirable. Magnificent. And even though Yuka looked worn out, she still clutched his tonfa, this a fiery resolution. And so, unnoticed by Yuka, Hibari's glare softened.

"Wow… you're tricky," he mused to himself, observing the way she gripped the steel handle. He was still breathing through his mouth. "But you're holding it wrong."

_Am I? Does it matter? _"Go to hell. You hold it just like this," she countered, lifting up his captured stick.

"Oh, you sound so sure," a malevolent smile spread across his face, making her feel uneasy. "You shouldn't have tossed aside the pot, herbivore."

"I know how to use a tonfa," she declared, "just like I knew how to use that _pot_. I don't see what the difference is." She was exasperated by his sudden cocky desire to have a conversation. "You think I go home and practice fighting with a watering pot all afternoon?" The comment struck Hibari, but he hid his reaction. She had been clever with the hunk of plastic.

Still, he noticed, why did her eyes wander to the corner she had tossed her green pot?

"Want to test me?" he challenged as he began to approach her with his deep masculine voice. His damp hair stuck to his cheeks and his awful foxy expression still mocked her. What was that look he gave her? Well, it wouldn't last long. She raised her tonfa horizontal to the ground, like he had at the beginning of the duel.

She placed her other hand careful on the waistband of her skirt.

"I don't need to be tested. There's nothing I hate more than pushy teachers."

"Che, suit yourself."

He pounced, forcing Yuka to defensively swipe at his neck. Hibari shifted to the side in an evasive step that look awfully like her own. His free hand shot out, vice-gripping her forearm and tonfa together.

_He has the upper-hand. _The revelation made her heart skip a beat.

"Let go!" she shouted, a little hysterical from a dangerous mixture of fatigue and fright. She launched a sidekick, but he block with his tonfa. She launched another. "Let go!" Another kick. Desperately. Desperatly trapped.

"No," he taunted, enjoying her flustered expression.

"I'm not finished with you yet. And like I told you, you were holding it wrong."

"I'm not holding it wrong," she growled. _HOW THE HECK DO I TURN ON THE SPIKES? _She tried now to pull her arm out of his grasp, but he tightened it.

"You think you can get away?" He asked rhetorically.

She paused to reassess her situation. _Can I get away?_ _No I must. It can't end like this. If I can just get closer to him._

"Yeah, I do." Hibari's eyes flickered momentarily at her tone. It was convincing.

She took a step towards him. _This might be suicidal._

_But it also might work._

She had hidden the sewing needle in her in her palm ever since she had placed her hand on her skirt waistband. She readied it in her hands.

Walking willingly into range, his tonfa immediately made contact with her stomach. But the pain, dizziness and disorientation from the blow didn't stop her.

They were close now, and both his hands were occupied, one holding her arm, the other, below her shoulders, near her gut. He was leaning down too. _Perfect._

"Stupid," he said coldly, the glitter gone from his eye.

"Look who's talking, eh?" She had reached up and held the sewing needle just above his collar bone. She pricked him gently. "I've got a small blade on your neck, so let go," she growled softly. He couldn't see it was only a sewing needle. _I hope this bluff works._

Hibari only looked at her sternly, but now, a little hesitant, a little uncertain, as if he were trying to read her mind. He eased off her stomach, but wouldn't let go of her forearm.

"Don't tell me you thought you won?" she mocked, reminding him with another prick. _I'm really tired and want this to be over with. I want to go home. _His hesitancy put her on edge. _Is he going to fall for it?_

"Tricky… so kill me then, Ms. Woof-woof." he chuckled bitterly. "Nice idea." Yuka's eyes widened as he smirked down at her. Drained of hope, she dropped the needle. It made a metallic clink as it hit the hardwood floor. Despondently, she bowed her head, focusing on her feet. _He saw through the bluff. It wasn't good enough._

_But it can't be over._

Hibari had leaned down, almost touching her forehead with his. His silky bang almost touched her forehead. "You give up?"

_Is it over?_

_No._

_Not after taking that hit in the gut._

Yuka's eyes sparkled. _It's not over._

She straightened her entire body and head-butted him in the forehead—they were that close. It was a perfect hit, just how Lal Mirch had taught her, and the prefect toppled, half from fatigue, to the floor. But ever since Hibari had smashed his tonfa into her rib cage, he had been supporting her with it. Without him propping her up, she collapsed right on top of him, dead tired.

Hibari rubbed his forehead. Her fatigue from the fight was evident as she unsteadily propped herself up on her elbow. Her other hand clutched the pocket protector over his heart. His body was warm under her, and it felt nice. It felt comfortable.

She was that tired.

"Hibari, I win this round," she grinned. Oh, man, had she been waiting for this. She had unleashed so much bottled up hatred. Now, she sat confidently on this boy, feeling like the Queen of the World. _A_nd what a throne!

Underneath her, the prefect shot her a bitter look of disapproval.

"Just get off." Those gruff words brought her to realize her closeness, the overwhelming closeness. She was sprawled on top of him. Shakily, she began to lift herself up. Not fast enough. Impatiently, he pushed her to the side.

But because she still clutched his shirt for support, she ended up pulling him back down. Back down, and on top of her. Yuka's eyes widened and she gasped, trying to avoid what was happening. But she had no leverage.

"Ugh. You're heavy! Hnnn." She found some air to breathe. "Hibari!" She waited a moment, awkwardly, expecting for him to roll off. "

"Hibari?" she hissed. No response. His face was nuzzled into her neck and his breath tickled.

"Hibari, get off me." _What is this, some kind of dumb joke?_

She wriggled underneath, curling her fingers around his shirt, and she finally managed to free herself. She sat up and looked down at his motionless body.

"Hibari, get up." He still didn't move. She shook his shoulder. Still, nothing.

Then she was worried. "Hibari, can't you get up?" But he didn't get up. He didn't move.

_Something's wrong._ She rolled him over. He looked like he was asleep. _What is it?_

She checked his neck where she had pricked him, but what could that have done? She glided her fingers down his arm, and felt a tiny bump. _A bump?_ She removed her fingers and a saw little pink bump _…a mosquito bite?_

"UH! THE SEDATIVES!"

She quickly fumbled with the lining of her skirt, where she had hidden the Trident Mosquito capsules Dr. Shamal had given her. She found that several had cracked open, probably from the fight, and obviously at least one had found a target. She hadn't wanted to use them.

"AUGGHHHH! NO! I didn't want this to happen." Her anguish was genuine. "Damn!" She banged her fist on the floor. She thought they were cowardly. They were spineless. They were pathetic. _To let an annoying little bug do the work for me? _Yuka frustration reached its peak. It wasn't a real fight. She hadn't really won. _But then… I guess he's ok... he just won't remember what happened._ _That's a shame… He won't remember.. _Yuka continued to look at him asleep.

_He looks different like this._ With his eyes close, the intimidating prefect didn't look so hostile. He didn't frown in his sleep. His expression was soft and delicate. It was… kissable.

_He's… attractive. _"Hmn. I like you better like this, sleeping beauty," she cooed in a low voice.

It felt funny referring to him as a fairytale princess, but the title fit none-the-less. She decided to pick him up and try putting him on the sofa to sleep, but he was too heavy. So instead, she propped him against his desk, and sat down next to him.

_Is it criminal to drug the Head prefect?_

_Probably._

She unwrapped a stick of hot cinnamon gum. She always thought cinnamon gum was the taste of pain, hot and fiery, a challenge. She reserved it for celebrations. That she didn't really win? That was too disappointing a thought. What if the mosquito had bit him at the last second and she really did win? Yuka was happier to take this benefit of the doubt.

_I've never fought anyone like him before. He's impressive… But not as strong as me._ She chuckled, remembering how she stole his tonfa. _But still why doesn't he look beat up?_ She leaned in closer to see if a punch she had landed on the side of his face had left a bruise at all.

…_Augh, he's so handsome. _She reached out to touch his damp jet black hair, still sticking to the edges of his face. Her fingers trailed to his soft, barely open mouth. Why was this boy so... so mesmerizing.

She glanced at his wet jacket, on the floor by the plants.

"Tsk. I got carried away."

She returned her attention to the drugged prefect. Her hand drifted slowly down to his black loosened necktie.

_His tie is messed up, too. _It was in disarray that could only match the stated of her leaf-blower hair. She glanced back at his slumbering face.

"Well, I did trash your armband…," she mumbled, as she fixed his black necktie, careful to make sure it was comfortably loose. Then she stood up and went to retrieve his jacket. It lay crumpled, sopping wet in a puddle on the floor. Delicately, she picked it up and her heart sunk. It was silk. _I wish I hadn't thrown water at him._

Upon further inspection, she noticed two large holsters sewn to the inside lining. _He must use these to hold his two tonfas. Their material doesn't match the jacket… Did he make these adjustments himself?_ She checked the stitches, which were small and neat. Yuka felt a tinge of jealousy.

Walking back to Hibari, she draped the wet jacket over the rim of the desk to dry. Then, she kneeled back at his side. Gosh, those lips. She liked the idea of kissing them. Sure, she was taking advantage of him, but, ugh, how many guys had tried to take advantage of her? It made sense.

Just a peck. She didn't mind giving away a kiss. She just didn't like them being taken.

Slowly, she leaned to his face, her nose rubbing against his, a hand pressed against his chest for support.

BAAAAAMMMMMMMMMM! The reception room door flew open!

Yuka jolted upward, almost falling backwards. She found herself gasping for breath, more embarrassed than ever.

"HIBARI? Are you here?" yelled a voice with an Italian accent.

"EH?" Yuka whipped around, fearful to be caught with the doped prefect. A tall, shaggy-blonde man in cargo pants and a loose t-shirt stood at the entrance to the reception room accompanied by another in a black suit.

"D-dino?" She rushed to the doorway, using her body to keep him from coming in and seeing the unconscious prefect.

"Yuka? HEY! I haven't seen you since you were in primary school! Man, its dark in here. Hey, have you seen the Head prefect? I'm looking for him."

Yuka was caught completely off guard. Dino was supposed to be in Italy. She hadn't seen him Lal Mirch had been assigned to keep an eye on the Vongola successor. Yuka was speechless.

"I…I…" _Do I need an excuse?_ "I didn't know you were in Japan! I… I gotta go, Dino." She peeked over her shoulder at Hibari and felt a bit awkward for staying with him while he slept.

"But Yuka! It's been so long. I heard about the whole Midori Incident. I came to Japan on business, but I was looking forward to visiting you." _Lal Mirch must have told him if he's calling it 'the Midori Incident._'

"What about my 'incident'?" She now glared at Dino. _If he scolds me about it…_

"Augh, I just wanted to check how you're doing in Namimori. I didn't think I'd find you in, uh, the reception room." _How does he know Hibari anyway? _"Your Aunt told me if I ran into you, she wanted me to pass on the message that Colonello is in town and that they're going out to dinner tonight." _That's good. Then I'll have the apartment to myself._

Dino pushed into the room past Yuka, and saw Hibari passed out on the floor. He froze, glanced back at Yuka, then at the prefect, then back at Yuka while pointing at the prefect.

Yuka knew she had better explain. "Dino, uh, you see, he was giving me trouble. I couldn't… I couldn't just do nothing…" she ended in a quiet voice. "Please, please don't tell my Aunt." She raised her eyes to him earnestly, and the tattooed Italian couldn't refuse.

Dino paused, seriously contemplating the situation. He stared suspiciously at Hibari's lax body.

"I won't tell Lal Mirch," he finally said. "But answer me this, how did you get involved with Tsuna's Cloud Guardian?"

"Well, he gave me a detention and one thing sort of led to another and—WAIT! Cloud guardian—?" Yuka looked down at Hibari, then back at Dino while pointing at the body. "He's a Vongola guardian? He's in the Mafia?" A stone dropped in her stomach. _Why hadn't anyone told me? He wasn't at Reborn's welcome party…_

"Mm yeah," answered Dino. He seemed lost in contemplation.

_This is messed up. Why does no one tell me ANYTHING important?_

_All along—I don't have to hide from him if he works for Tsuna._

"Uhh, Dino, umm, did my Aunt mention the trident mosquitoes that Dr. Shamal gave me…?" Her urgent eyes met Dino's and he understood. "I won't tell Lal Mirch you used them so quickly either," he said chuckling.

"It was an accident, _actually,_" she sharply corrected

"Of course, of course. Secret's safe."

"Dino, I'm just worried that he might have overdosed. I, uh, well, I might have used more than one." Yuka eyed the floor, her arms crossed over her chest loosely. Dino remembered how when she was little, that was a sign that the mischievous brat was truly sorry. His face softened.

"I'll take care of him," he said reassuringly.

"Thanks," she said, sighing in relief. "Listen, I'll see you around. I missed you, too." She beamed at the blonde. "You always clean up my messes, Dino." Dino was walking her to the door, looking slightly confused over his shoulder at the prefect.

"I want to get a tattoo, soon," Yuka continued, "Of a flying swan on the back of my neck. Will you come with me to get it done?" She had always admired his collection of flaming skulls and twisting thorns on his muscular arms. She eyed that arm, clamped over her shoulder to lead her out of the room.

"You know I will. But only if Lal Mirch gives you permission."

Yuka face soured at the mentioning of her Aunt. _It's my body. I shouldn't need her permission._

"AUGH! Why do you always take her side, Dino?" she burst out, angry that he was treating her like a baby. They stood outside the entrance to the reception room.

"Heh. It's because Lal Mirch has you under her thumb that you're still _alive_. Seriously, her rules are what's keep you from pulling stupid stunts and getting killed. Like this collision with the prefect, very stupid." He lifted up a tear in the belly of her white shirt to prove his point.

_But I became strong so I could have my freedom, not to be restrained under my Aunt's stupid rules. So that no one could push me around._

Dino continued, "I remember, the last time you didn't listen to her, you had that horrible time at the Mafia Ball—"

"Shut UP!" Yuka interrupted heatedly. "I hate that ball and I hate those punks, ESPECIALLY that stupid black-haired girl from Shimon family!"

"Oh. Suzuki Adelaide? I remember her. What did she do, look at you the wrong way?" Dino teased sarcastically.

"Tsk. It wasn't like that, Dino. You'll never understand what she did to me." Yuka looked vexed. Then, taking a last, uncertain glance at Hibari in the reception room, she left to go back home.

_God, I'm exhausted._

_

* * *

_

"Hibari, cut the crap."

Dino returned into the reception room, his whip now hanging at his side. Romario stood by guarding the entrance. Dino's attitude became much more serious after the girl had left.

"I don't know why you're toying with Yuka, but, fuck, she's Lal Mirch's niece." Dino crouched next to Hibari, staring fixedly at his face.

"Hibari? I know you're awake. There's no way in hell Shamal's meds can sedate you."

Slowly, the prefect's eyes creaked open with a brilliant anger glittering inside.

"Can't you knock?" Hibari growled.

Dino quirked his eyebrow. "Oh, did I interrupt something. What were you and Yuka doing?"

"None of your business." Hibari's eyes narrowed, glinting unpleasantly. Dino backed away a little now that he was awake.

"Why were you pretending to be unconscious, anyway?"

"I was sleepy."

Dino paused again, thinking carefully. He'd always considered Yuka to be his little sister. But last time she caught him asleep, she drew all over his face. Why didn't she do the same to his mentee? Slowly, a theory creeped into his mind. It was a theory that his brotherly instincts could not allow.

"Hibari, do me a favor and don't get involved with Yuka-chan," Dino said in a tone that didn't sound like a plea but an order. "You know, she has enough problems in her own life. She's made a lot of dangerous enemies recently. I don't want you provoking her."

"Enemies with who?" Hibari's tone demanded an answer. Dino was worried that the prefect utterly disregarded his request.

"Reborn will tell you if you need to know. Like I said, you shouldn't get involved with Yuka-chan. You have other priorities," Dino explained, taking his whip in both hands. "Anyway, I came to talk about the Vongola ring. Why aren't you wearing it?"

"The baby knows, eh?" A frown graced Hibari's stern face. "Fine." Nonchalantly, he fought the narcotic and picked himself up. Then, he reached for his jacket dangling from the edge of the desk, and slung it over his shoulder. The mad glint had returned.

"Talking about the ring is not my main concern, as long as I can bite you to death."


	7. Jaws of Life

The Jaws of Life

Yuka peeled her Aunt's note off the fridge. The alphabet magnets spelled '_or else' _beside it. They haven't been touched in years.

_Yuka,_

_Bread is on the counter. Eat at the kitchen table, not in your room. Wash the dishes in the sink. Clean the bathroom. I found the nail polish you hid under a floorboard in your room. No allowance this week and you can forget about that cell phone I promised._

_Do not leave the apartment. I will know._

_Much love,_

_Lal Mirch_

Yuka crumpled the note and tossed it into the waste basket. _Lal Mirch, what would I do without you?_

She reached for a slice of whole wheat toast that lay on the counter. It would taste better with peanut butter, but neither of them had gone grocery shopping in a while. Lal was too busy with work, and Yuka had to hide in the apartment.

Right now, had only one thing on her mind: Lal Mirch was GONE, and the purple switchblade was hidden somewhere in the apartment. Time to search for her mother's switchblade.

Suddenly, Yuka's stomach clenched like an iron fist. It was that feeling you get when you realized you forgot something after it was too late. That weird sickening, floating feeling.

_Oh My GOSH! I should have searched the reception room for the ring. Hibari was sedated. It was the perfect opportunity! I'm such an idiot! How could I forget?_

She couldn't eat any more of the bread. It had formed an uncomfortably sticky blob in her stomach, taking away her appetite.

And thus, despondently, she began to search the apartment for the purple switchblade.

* * *

The members of Varia, excluding Xanxus, were clustered around a massive wall of TV screens recording various areas of Namimori. About half of the cameras focused on Namimori School, on the courtyard, and the hallways. Other areas of town were also under surveillance, including the shrine, the local playgrounds, and the bridge over the Namimori River.

"The record says she lives with her mother," Mammon explained. "I don't know why she's in Japan."

"Shishishi~ old cloud lady is smart to have hidden her outside the country. She must have suspected we would go after her daughter since she retired."

"I MISSS KALI MIRCH SOOOO MUUCCHHH!" announced Lussuria. "SHE TAUGHT ME HOW TO BE FASHIONABLE—!" He twirled, showing off his Varia outfit.

"VVVOOOI! SHUT UP YOU PANSY!" Squalo whacked Lussuria. "PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR CAMERAS!" Lussuria was wearing a very large hat to hide his long pink hair. The dye had faded to a lovely shade of magenta that Yuka would be very jealous of.

"SQUALOoooooOOOOoooOOOOooOOO" Lussuria cooed. "Don't be so MeAn. How about we make a deal! I'll be quiet if you put on this LoVeLy dress I made!" He proudly held up something Pepto-Bismol pink, covered in lacy frills and shiny ribbons. It almost blinded Squalo, worshiper of black manly trench coats.

And he was tempted. Anything to shut Lussuria up, but he knew the moment he touched it, his skin would burn.

"VOOOIII NEVVEERRRR!"

As Lussuria pounced on Squalo, trying to slip the dress over his head, Mammon, unnoticed, floated out of the room. Finally, out of ear-shot, he flipped open his cellphone.

"Reborn?" he whispered, "I have the information you purchased. I only take deposits to my account in Switzerland…"

* * *

Believe it or not, Yuka found her treasure at the very back of the spice cabinet, behind a shaker of black pepper. She had searched all over the house for it. Curious, she sat at the kitchen table, rolling the pocket knife in her hands.

She remembered how a man named Verde had made this knife. _Verde… Who was Verde?_

The handle was smooth and felt like violet polished stone in her hand. _It's too light to be made of stone._ She flicked her wrist, releasing the blade. She played with it, wondering what other tools it carried. Little scissors, a screw driver, a USB drive, a wrench, night-vision lenses, and… bubble gum? How could so much fit in such a tiny handle? She popped a piece into her mouth. _Spearmint._

She opened the knife's blade again. Carefully, she traced her finger along the 10 cm piece of steel. The sharpness satisfied her. But there was a certain roughness to it in some places.

Upon taking a closer look, she realized the knife had been engraved with writing. Yuka squinted to read the graceful cursive.

_To my fire, my perfect delight, and my perfect agony._

Yuka's eyes widened. She felt like she was going to choke. _Verde? Did he… love her? _Lal Mirch had never told her about her father.

Suddenly, she heard the all-too-familiar squeak of the front door opening and Lal Mirch's rare giggle.

"HEY! Yuka!" Came Colonnello's voice from the entrance. "We're back!"

"Oh, be quiet Colonnello. She might be sleeping," whispered Lal, embarrassed. She sounded like a giddy young school girl, not her normal gruff self. Talk about a split personality.

"Hey, nonsense, we have leftover sushi. We can't let it go to waste."

Yuka quickly tucked the switchblade into her skirt waistband, only to shudder in horror. _My uniform!_ Her skirt was still tattered at the hem and her cotton shirt was dotted with holes. _Lal is going to kill me. This is my only uniform._ On tip-toes, she snuck to the staircase, hoping to get upstairs and pretend to be sleeping.

But Lal was better than that.

"WHAT HAPPENED?" A murderous a murderous intent reflected in her eyes. Yuka tried to calm her down. A scuffle with a guardian. Nothing that would oust her from Namimori.

"Midnight Punishment Training, 7pm tomorrow night, Namimori Bridge. Bring your bathing suit." Yuka let out a moan in her room. She didn't like swimming. She didn't even own a bathing suit.

* * *

Soaking wet.

Soaking wet in her see-through white dress. They were all staring at her, swirling the wine in their glasses with disapproval.

With contempt.

Her form collapsed.

Helpless.

_Slut._

_

* * *

_

Early Thursday morning, Yuka slipped out of the apartment, while her Aunt and Colonnello gurgled in their sleep. What? Do you think they were having sex last night?

They're babies!

Yuka was disturbed from the nightmare she dreamed last night. Not that she was scared. She didn't even remember it well, but it had left her feeling empty when she woke. Her Lucky Charms didn't taste the same.

But she had more important stuff to think about. Which direction was Haru's house again? Haru was a wiz with the sewing machine, and Yuka needed her uniform to be repaired before school started. She felt her shirt. So many holes... Was it even possible to repair?

She was still rubbing the sleep from her eyes when she passed the local park. An adorable yellow bird, the same buttercup yellow of Yuka's hair, was pecking at berries on a branch. It was very cute and round, and when she walked by it, it cocked its head to the side and chirped:

"HEE-BUR-EE."

Yuka froze. _Did that bird just tweet Hibari?_ She ogled the bird in amazement, while it returned her gaze cautiously.

"HEE-BUR-EE," it chirped again.

_Naaaa. It just must be some weird bird noise. _Yuka shrugged it off and continued on her way.

But the strange bird's tweet brought into her mind the prefect.

_Hibari Kyoya… I don't know what to think of him anymore….He was a good fight. _She smiled to herself at the memory of the duel. She had never been so concentrated in her life. Not even when, last summer, she spent a week camping in the woods and meditating in the forest. Her aunt had thought she ran away, but she had come back glowing, twigs stuck in her unbrushed hair.

It was a nice memory. Empowering. The fight in the reception room had pulled something out of her, some piece of sadness in her heart. She felt more _alive_ as she walked to Haru's house, a spring evident in her step.

Sure, he was a complete jerk, but he fought with class. She had to respect that. And maybe things would be different now that she won in a fair fight. _Fair fight. _The mosquito tranquilizers popped into her mind. _That's right, it wasn't fair…_

She stopped walking, her face reddening as she imagined the sleeping face, wet hair, delicate lashes, messy necktie and slightly open mouth of the sedated cloud guardian. _DON'T THINK ABOUT IT! DON'T! It's stupid to get caught up in his appearance when, deep down, he's just sadistic asshole._

She snorted like an angry rhinoceros, trying to push the memory of 'sleeping beauty' out of her mind.

_PLUS, two more afternoons with Officer Jerk-Face._ She had two more detentions to make up. Damn him.

But she shivered again, remembering his resting face's softened expression, framed by dark velvet hair.

_It's hard to believe he's a bad guy when he looks like that._

_

* * *

_

Haru was better with the needle than Yuka expected. The lemon-headed Yuka was a bit sour as she silently observed her friend sew her skirt. Haru never noticed, talking a mile a minute about Tsuna and the beach house they would retire in. Finally, Haru's usual inquisitive curiosity revealed itself.

"Yuka, have you found anyone special at Namimori?" Haru asked. _Has she heard something_? "Love is such a GREAT thing to be in, you know," Haru continued leaning forward.

"Psshhhh~ Haru? You really think I've changed that much in three days?" Yuka blabbed. "Like I told you, I have no interest in having a boyfriend. Guys just _disgust_ me. They just have no respect, you know. No respect and no concept of honor and…"

Haru eye's twinkled as they followed her needle. She may be springy, clueless, and a little hyper sometimes, but she was an expert at being in love. After all, she was always in love. And Yuka's usual passion and ardor for slandering the male gender was missing.

Just something in the tone of voice.

* * *

Yuka left Haru's house in her freshly sewn uniform. She had 30 minutes to get to school, and she was still in Midori's school district. As she cut through the park, she came across the fluffy, yellow chick again. It sat on the same old branch.

"HEE-BUR-EE" it tweeted, and to Yuka's amazement, flitted into the air, and landed on her shoulder.

"Now aren't you something," Yuka giggled.

"HEE-BUR-EE" it tweeted again happily. She used her finger to tickle it under the chin, and it seemed to smile. Yuka's heart went to it.

Thus distracted, Yuka jumped out of her regulation cross-knit socks as a little calico cat popped out of the alleyway. Her first instinct was to protect the bird, but she sighed in relief when the feline ran into the street. Wait. The street? That's not safe! Suddenly, a black-haired girl in a green Kokuyo uniform whooshed out of the alleyway following the cat. And into the street.

Both didn't seem to be sticklers for rules. None looked both ways before crossing, as they teach in, what, freakin' kindergarten? Besides inventing eyeballs to check if cars are coming, God had the miraculous idea to introduce to humans the cell phone. Currently, this particular device was being used by a truck driver, who happened to be hurtling down the road. The particular road next to the park in Namimori - the particular lane that this girl was standing in the middle of.

The little bird on her shoulder was paralyzed, fear causing its little talons to prick her shoulder.

And Yuka couldn't live with herself if she did nothing.

Quickly, she flicked open her pocket knife and dashed out into the street. The girl, who had managed to snatch the cat up in her arms, froze like a doe trapped in headlights. Yuka knew she wouldn't get out of the way by herself. The truck was only a few feet away when she grabbed the young woman's green jacket and pulled her down to the rough asphalt. She held the girl and the cat in a tight embrace. The truck careened above them and something on the undercarriage snagged her newly sewn uniform, tearing the back down the middle.

But Yuka had already plotted her revenge. While the truck whooshed overhead, Yuka held her knife, sharp end pointing up, to the trucks thick tires. The knife was strong. They blew out and after the truck had passed over them, it skidded out of control and slammed into a tree trunk in the park. The driver leaped out and cursed at the tree, completely unaware that he had run over two girls.

"Are you ok?" the mysterious girl asked, ghost pale and shaking, while Yuka investigated the damage to her shirt. Both girls were breathing heavily from the shock of being run over.

She hadn't been cut, but a 30 cm gaping slash had been torn into her blouse. The back of her pink, frilly bra peeked through.

_Damn. I have no time to go back to Haru's house to get this fixed, too._

Dazed and a little jittery herself, she turned to the Kokuyo student. She studied her outfit with admiration. Her dark hair was cut short and sloppily like Yuka's, but messed up in the back with gel, making it stick out in short spikes. She wore a tough-as-nails eye patch with a silver skull painted on, a matching leather skull belt, and midnight black motorcycle boots.

_Poor girl. Kokuyo Middle has some of the worst perverts in town._ She recalled the gang that had pounced on her back in her Midori days.

"I'm fine, but my uniform… My Aunt is going to kill me for ruining it again," Yuka replied, now trying to pinch the hole closed. But it would just fall apart miserably. It was a solid slice from her collar to the middle of her back. _This is going to be so embarrassing…_ Yuka didn't like this exposure. She would have preferred the many tiny holes any day.

"Um, well, thank you, I… I don't know what to say."

Yuka turned back to the girl, smiling at her cute speechlessness. She seemed a little helpless, but Yuka's high opinion of her remained unchanged. Her courage for rescuing the calico cat was truly admirable. Or her stupidity. Either way, it was on par with Yuka's courage, or stupidity, or whatever it is that makes people risk their lives.

"You can say you owe me one," Yuka answered, grinning. Favors were always better when repaid. She got up and put her hand down to help the chick up after her. "I'm Hakuchou Yuka, but please, call me by my first name." Something about the girl reminded her of herself. She sympathized with her.

"My name is Chrome Dokuro," she pronounced, smiling shyly. She took Yuka hand, got up, then leaned in and kissed her lightly on the cheek. "Thank you. I owe you one."

Chrome made a short bow, then, still clutching the cat, ran off back down the alley way.

"I'll see you around, Chrome," Yuka shouted, waving as the girl ran off.

_Heh. I'm not in as much of a hurry to get where I'm going._ Her smile slipped off her face as the little yellow bird alighted on her shoulder. _If Lal finds out if I'm late to school—if she finds out I wrecked my uniform again—I'm doomed._

"HEE-BUR-EE" piped the young bird, sensing Yuka's nihilistic demeanor.

"Easy for you to say." She shooed the bird away. She blamed it. Maybe her reflexes would have been faster if it had left her alone.

And so, Yuka trudged glumly to Namimori, praying that Hana or Kyoko might have a spare uniform. The midnight punishment sat stoically on a heavy throne in the back of her mind. The day was getting worse and worse, and the ecstasy she felt from yesterday's duel was slowly fading away.

* * *

"It's nice to see you again, but you're late."

He leaned cross armed against a tree. Yuka hadn't seen him. She was hoping to sneak through the school courtyard. Avoid confrontations, and the like. She wheeled around, blocking the prefect's view of her torn uniform—As if she would let him see her lingerie! Her hands clawed behind her back, struggling to clamp the tear together.

"Yeah, thanks. I know I'm late, Captain Obvious. I'm going to the main office."

His mouth turned downwards in a haughty frown. His black jacket was draped loosely over his shoulders, a new prefect armband safety-pinned to his sleeve. The wind came in strong from the east, giving his hair a sort of dancing life. Yuka noticed Hibari was missing his usual dark necktie and his crisp, linen shirt collar, partially unbuttoned, fluttered with pieces of his hair. Even though he was dressed so casually, he could still pass as a stoic aristocrat, a heartless man who lived all alone in a castle in the clouds.

Her sarcastic shout didn't ward him off. The suffocating feeling was returning as he leaned off the tree and approached her. _I have no freedom in this school. I can't even breathe without his permission._

"What are you hiding behind your back?" Hibari asked in a bored drawl as he advanced. "If you don't show me, I'll bite you to death."

"Uhh, it's…" She wavered under his cool scrutiny. What could she say? She was hiding spray paint? Honesty would have to be her ticket. She was too distressed to think of a decent lie. "It's something embarrassing," she laughed uneasily. "Believe me, you don't want to see it. Now I'll just be going now…" She side stepped in the direction of the office doors, making sure he couldn't see her back.

"Nnn? Where do you think you're going?" He smirked sardonically. "In fact, if I remember correctly, you left in the middle of detention. We have unfinished business."

It took a moment for his meaning to register in Yuka's mind.

_NO! I completely forgot! His amnesia makes him forget that I went to his stupid detention yesterday!_

Yuka's eyes widened in anxiety. The same wind that made Hibari's silky hair dance, annoyingly whipped her short buttercup tresses. She couldn't even wipe them away, her hands guardedly clutching the back of her shirt.

_If he sees me like this, I will be so embarrassed. _Pretty much, dead with embarrassment. Mortified.

And on top of all this calamity, the dread of midnight punishment training clung to her like a sword stuck in her gut. The memory of biting sores and raw blisters from the last one made her fear the future. Fear the unknown future. She didn't want it to come.

Oh, boy, did she not want it to come.

No. She just wanted to escape.

"HIBARI KYOYA, WILL YOU JUST LEAVE ME ALONE! I HAVE ENOUGH PROBLEMS IN MY LIFE!" she cried. Her eyes brimmed with tears of aggravation as she defensively tightened her grip. "I JUST WANT ONE DAY OF PEACE! JUST ONE DAY!"

Silence pervaded the courtyard after her outburst, broken by each of Hibari's unperturbed footsteps on the brown, dusty dirt. She shifted her eyes around the courtyard. It was just them. She returned he gaze cautiously to the prefect. His eyes pried into her own. His proximity made her take a few step back. Was she in range of his tonfas? He still frowned in disapproval, but his eyes glittered, betraying a sort of sympathy.

"What's the matter?"

His voice lowered to a softer tone. Soft like the warm downy feathers of a skylark. Like his sleeping face.

"I don't want to talk about it," Yuka murmured, her voice still shaking with emotion.

Suddenly, his tonfa flashed, and before she knew it, she had caught it with her hands. Thwack! The blow was nothing like his usual strength. A bluff to make her flinch? Her white shirt sagged, falling down her shoulder, unstoppable as the tide pulling from the seashore. It would have fallen to her feet if she weren't squeezing her armpits. Her soft pink bra strap peek out, matching with her pink skin. Pink and soft. Very feminine. She swiftly released his tonfa and pulled her shirt back, blushing angrily, and ignorant, too, that the prefect's mask had also slipped. Although, not to the same degree. A slight rose tint had risen to his cheeks, and for once, he seemed restrained and self-conflicted. More than hesitant.

The cloud guardian was coming to a very large conclusion.

"There. Are you satisfied? My uniform ripped..." Yuka couldn't look him in the face, her own turning very scarlet. Sure, she wore her skirt rolled up, but not for attention. It was just more comfortable. Now, humiliation consumed her. It had never come to this in her street fights. "I was going to take care of it when I got inside."

"You can't walk around like that." Lifting her head, she noticed his eyes flaming with resolution. Hesitancy replaced with assurance.

She followed him woozily to the Reception Room. She was too flustered and embarrassed to break free and run away. Speechless. She was knocked completely out of character. What was happening? Why wasn't she putting up a fight? Why was she following him like some complacent dog?

Inside, he made his way to his desk and searched though the many compartments, his silken hair falling over his eyes.

"Turn around," he instructed, nose still in the drawer.

"No." She was slowly recovering. One hand hovered near her pocketknife, while the other still reached over her shoulder and held her shirt in place.

He lifted his head, then, silently, showed her a needle, a spool of white thread, and a small pair of fabric scissors.

"Shall I ask you again?" He didn't sound like those Midori thugs. More like Mrs. Rushito. Could she trust him? No. Something was wrong. Why would he do her any favors?

"Why are you doing this?"

His eyes fixed on her, piercing her, then shifted back down to the open drawer. "Because I cannot allow a student to so blatantly disobey the dress code," he said matter-of-factly, closing the drawer shut. Yuka eyed him suspiciously. Why did he look so agitated?

But his answer made sense. She turned around, still self-consciously holding the shirt together, her skirt swaying. She had never been so insecure about it before. Something about the cloud guardian... she felt like she was out of control around him. She heard the pap-pat-pat of his footsteps on the floor. Like her heartbeat. He tugged the bottom of her shirt down, she thought, to make it easier to begin the first stitch. Instead she heard the zip of ripping fabric. Cold air hit her back like an arctic wind. He had used the sharp scissors to finish the tear in her shirt.

She yelped, thunderstruck.

_I knew he was a pervert!_

And she almost shouted it, too. But Hibari quickly placed his jacket neatly over his shoulders and held it there with heavy hands.

"Don't be so surprised," he advised coolly. "It's the only way I can tailor it."

Yuka glowered venomously over her shoulder. She knew he could sew, but she didn't believe he needed to rip it off her back to repair it.

"I can't believe you did that!" she growled, reaching for her skirt waistband. But before she could turn fully around, whip out her switch blade, and start a whole new reception room battle, Hibari pulled her backwards into his chest. The cloud guardian already had a firm hold on her shoulders. It was easy to wrap one arm around her collar bone and the other tightly over her stomach. Yuka caught her breath. She had not expected such a battle move.

"What are you doing!" she cried hysterically, finding air. Her fingers pried at his smooth, creamy skin loosely wound around the base of her neck. She feared it would lift and choke her.

_Is he starting a fight?_

"Let go, you bastard!" she snarled.

His head nudged the side of hers, hushed laughter tickling her ear. "Oh? Whatever happened to 'sleeping beauty'?" he teased softly.

Yuka's clammy grip on his arm faltered. _Who told him? _She quieted, her mind racing of ways to deny it. She didn't want him to know she had daydreamed of his soft, pouty lips. His delicate lashes. The way his shirt was casually unbuttoned. He was holding her so close. His belt buckle dug sharply into the small of her back and his lips brushed against her ear. Luscious hot breath.

"I don't like you," she emphasized, finding the room to mule kick him in the shin.

"You have no strength. You know that?"

Yuka's eye twitched at the insult. She would have repeated the move if he hadn't repositioned her butt against his thigh. She lost the angle she had before. How could she push him off now?

"Can't you just give me a girls' uniform shirt?" she said in a low voice, to keep it from cracking. She was completely enveloped by him, their body heat melting together. Her full weight was supported by Hibari's chest. His smell. Like pine trees. Her heart throbbed in her ear. She could even feel him breathing, feel the vibrations of his voice. And as she clung desperately to the smooth skin of his arm, a new sensation rumbled in her gut. A sort of adrenaline rush.

"What do I have to do to make you wear the jacket?"

His jacket? Why? She struggled not to fall beneath the surface of her emotions, clinging to his arm as if it were floating driftwood. She couldn't trust herself. It scared her even more that she couldn't break free of him. He wasn't even wearing Tag and its laboratory pheromones that sent her a-wall. What was this spell?

"Fine. Just let me go. I'll wear your jacket." His body was just so warm, so strong and warm. Why did she like it so much? "Or I'll prove I can pound you into the ground, even when I'm at the disadvantage," she threatened, hiding her true feelings.

The voice hanging on her ear moaned with laughter before answering, as if her threat pleased him greatly. "Mmn? Impress me, then."

And with that, he pulled her closer into him, his head sinking into her neck. "Hibari!" She squirmed, trying to break them apart, but she was caught in the vice-like jaws of a shark.

"Hibari! Why are you being so stubborn?"

His soft raven hair brushed her cheek and his pressing lips testily nipped her neck, making her hair stand on end. She could feel the muscles of his chest, hard as concrete, through his soft jacket. His soft silk jacket. Was that all that separated them?

"Is your shirt really all that's bothering you?" His lips lifted to her jaw line, the laughter partiality gone from his voice.

"You're bothering me." If this information was the only thing she could withhold from him, so be it. But he didn't seem to get the hint. Nope. Instead, he was peeling back the midnight black jacket's collar like the petal from a flower, revealing her baby pink bra strap.

"Hey, isn't this against school rules?" She couldn't prevent her voice from shaking now. She had _never_ relied on rules to save her. Her last ditch effort.

"And you think such logic will restrain me?" she could practically hear his haughty grin. She felt it on her shoulder's skin. His burning lips.

Meanwhile, Yuka's shirt was riding upward from the friction of his arms and her wriggling, exposing her belly button. She stared in shock as one of the prefect's hands slid casually down her side, on its way to her bare, exposed skin. She couldn't let him!

He didn't have permission for that!

It had to end.

Yuka wrapped her fingers around his, capturing and holding his hand, tenaciously interlocking their fingers. She would rather let him choke her. She couldn't lose control of the situation. She couldn't let him get closer.

_Slut._

The dream.

"Stop!"

_Fucking whore._

Something in her shattered.

"No! Let me go!" she gasped again, jagged with fear, squeezing his hand with every ounce of her strength. Her voice had finally cracked. She truly didn't want this. Her body shot coldness, a quivering stillness, like a frozen anchovy. The kind they feed to captive killer whales. The kind that have no flavor.

Hibari paused, his eyes becoming less cloudy, startled back to himself. It wasn't right. Something about it wasn't what he wanted. Her body grew colder by the second.

And her hand was so tight around his.

"I win this round," he finally whispered in her ear.

His arms slackened and Yuka immediately stepped away, bundling the jacket tightly around her shoulders. Her horn-rimmed glasses hung lopsided on her face. She turned to glare at him, pushing the bridge of her glasses up to straighten them. He wasn't staring at her, but at his desk. The profile of his face, hidden by a protective shadow, tilted downward.

Turning to leave, his stoic bossiness returned. "I'll be outside. Give me your uniform after you're changed."

His footsteps out were nothing like her heartbeat. Her heartbeat was too frantic. The door clicked behind him.

Was this the same person she had danced with on Tuesday? The same guy who had nearly broken her foot? What had happened to him?

And why did she think of that stupid dream? That stupid nightmare?

Dino always blamed himself for her nightmares. He blamed himself for letting her watch that famous shark movie. He was there when she woke up crying, Lal Mirch having left him to babysit.

There's just something horrific about a massive shark rough scales brushing against a naked skinny-dipper. Something about the way it toyed with her, eating bits of her alive, before pulling her under the murky ocean, her carcass wrapped in its layers of teeth.

Wet.

Naked.

Helpless.

She just couldn't throw the image out of her head.

And now, alone in the empty reception room, she felt like she had ruined something. The way he held her… deep inside, all her life, she had wanted to be held like that. To be supported like that. Was this love?

Or was it hell?

She thought of being called a slut. People had always called her one, the Midori clique giggling as she walked by. But she had never, truly, felt like one.

Damn, she hated the word like no other. She hated herself for letting him touch her.

So was she a slut now?

Was this what sluts did?

Let men hold them?

And what did _he_ think? What was going on in _his_ mind? She thought she had won something from him, respect at least, in the duel yesterday. She doubted this was love.

Yeah right, could a monster like Hibari Kyoya love.

He behaves just like any other punk.

Slowly, Yuka peeled her shirt off and pulled her arms through the coat's sleeves. She held the fabric covering her arm to her nose and inhaled deeply. Damn.

It smelled like him.


	8. Waltzing on the Edge

Waltzing on the Edge

Hibari leaned his back against the door after it clicked shut. As his granite eyes cooled, he finally realized it. This feeling—it was more powerful, more arousing, more potent than any brawl he had ever fought—

The 'wow' floated off his lips, unheard by the girl behind him.

The girl spastically wondering what the heck had just happened.

* * *

Scissors—No. Screwdriver—No.

Yuka needed gum. She needed that intense herb flavor to numb her overloaded mind. The fresh mint would help her calm her down. Help her catch her breath. Gosh, what he had done to her! She felt like a fish, hooked, hauled onto a boat, gills gasping for water, cheek ripped open.

Then thrown back.

Popping the small, green-tinted pieces into her mouth, she concentrated all her frustration and anxiety into her jaw muscles. Furtively, she glanced around the room. She never had the chance to see it empty before. The potted plants from the 'tree-planting club' were still cluttered in the corner of the room, a shade lifted to give them some light. Otherwise, the dim room felt like a cavern; it felt larger and more threatening than it really was, shrouded in darkness. The furniture barely took up any space: a lounge sofa, two bookcases, and the prefect's desk.

A little devious grin spread across Yuka's face. She had Hibari's desk all to herself.

She slinked across the room, walking on tip-toes. Carefully, she opened all the drawers. Its contents were perfectly innocuous, containing office supplies like fountain pens and stationary, a book on kanji, a first aid kit… She jiggled the last drawer, which refused to pull out. Stuck? No. It was locked. Despite her delinquent past, Yuka had never actually broken into a teacher's desk before. She wasn't_ that_ cool. Just a little feisty. Besides, Mrs. Rushito had always just trashed the little toys and hair accessories she confiscated.

Still, she made up her mind to try. Dexterously, she inserted the elegant lock-picking prongs into the keyhole. She had no idea what the heck she was doing. Really, she had the whole mechanism inserted upside down. So, indeed, she was working the drawer wrong way. And she was worried about the pocket knife. What if her tool got stuck? So she worked slowly and carefully.

And now, she was taking too long.

* * *

Yuka emerged from the reception room, adjusting the men's cut jacket. It fit her rather awkwardly. Heidi always toted her boyfriend's uniform jacket as if it was a fashion statement, but this just felt… strange. The sleeves were too long, Yuka needed to roll them up, and it was baggy around her shoulders. She detached the jacket's prefect badge, putting it in the pocket.

Hibari was leaning next to the door, a black silk necktie now hanging around his loosened collar. He probably grabbed it on the way out. She could only study him in pieces: his collar, his shoes, his hands. Why was it so much harder to keep her composure now? She bitterly fought back a blush when she found herself standing beside him. She just wanted to get away. Get away to the roof. She wanted to think about what had happened. Thus spurred, Yuka spoke up first, tensely.

"About the whole 'sleeping beauty' nickname, ugh," Hibari's glinting eyes caught hers, and she couldn't hold herself together. "Just forget it," she mumbled. Why was she losing herself like this? Why was she becoming so weak in front of him?

It was the adrenaline rush. She had never felt it on such a high level. It was scary at first, but addicting. Just like a fight.

Did she like it, then?

As she held out to him the ripped shirt, she imagined another future, an alternative universe, in which she had turned around and embraced him. In which she ran her fingers over his chest and through his hair, tucked her lips into his neck. In which she had told him all her problems, all her worries, all her sorrows, all her frustrations.

An utterly horrible idea.

She didn't even love him. He was practically a stranger!

She wagged the ripped shirt, furious now because he wasn't relieving it from her. She avoided looking at his staunchly leaning frame as she heard him chuckle softly.

"I only return favors. Fix my tie and we'll call it even," Hibari explained, an entertained sneer growing across his face.

"Are you kidding me!" she announced.

"You have to do what I say."

Why did she have to be so dependent on him? Goddamn him and his nonchalance.

Yuka closed her eyes exasperated. Did he like seeing her squirm? She held back the earnest, babyish expression she gave Lal Mirch she used to make her aunt change her mind, opting for a dark and deadly flash of the eyes. She wanted to intimidate him. Push fear into his soul. But she could only manage a flash. That lean, hard body sent her heart palpitating like a nervous rabbit's. Looking at his folded arms, she felt them wrapped hot around her again. Glimpsing his mouth, spewing the order to 'kiss my ass,' she felt tender lips caressing her neck and shoulder. Even his hands, in her mind, tickled her bra strap and raked the side of her body, on their way lower and lower….

_Oh Lal! What should I do? Is this all right?_

But what would Lal think if she caught her in a boy's uniform, with nothing underneath but her bra? Nothing underneath but a bra! What had she become? Yuka gnashed her teeth. She needed her fixed shirt ASAP—she would have to suck up her pride. Kiss his ass.

At least just this once.

Grudgingly, she tucked the mangled shirt under her armpit - a borderline Frankenstein shirt repeatedly brought back to life like a phoenix from the ashes - and she reached for the repulsive black tie. It was excruciatingly difficult keeping her stone cold face emotionless. She wouldn't give him the satisfaction of a blush, which she knew would explode across her cheeks if her eyes tilted upward. If she caught sight of his luxurious, black-as-the-night-sky hair and self-confident, almost reassuring smirk. Everything about him, now, made her heart pound. She pictured Hibari was Dino, only Dino, in her mind. Dino, who was getting ready for his Cavallone inheritance ceremony. Dino, who didn't unnerve her in the slightest. She gave a final tug to the black silk fabric, hoping it was painfully tight. Hoping to make it difficult for him to breathe. Hoping to make him feel like some complacent, collared dog.

"Satisfied?" she mocked.

He just reached up and loosened it himself.

"It's good enough." He took her shirt from under her armpit, tossing it over his shoulders. Finally, he turned around and left, back to work patrolling the hallway for students skipping class.

"Don't forget, you have another detention after school," he said without bothering to look over his shoulder. "This is my last warning."

"Excuse me?"

"Go to class."

* * *

Yuka lazily stretched her body out on the rooftop like a tired tabby cat as she carefully read over the mysterious engraving.

_To my fire, my perfect delight, and my perfect agony._

The fresh breeze cleansed her lungs of the reception room's dank atmosphere. Still, her mind couldn't escape from Vongola's cloud guardian. She was after, clothed in his jacket, that smell of his still teasing her nose. She warily suspected he was nearby, watching her, stalking her, even though it was probably just his coat playing tricks. Was it the same one she thought she had ruined? The tonfas' holsters cushioned her stomach as she laid on the cement floor.

She had pulled out the knife, examining it to distract herself. Lal Mirch had always avoided talking about her mother and father, only mentioning them in brief snippets. Only using their names to make her do her chores. _Your mother would have wanted this._ _Your father would have wished that._

And who was Verde anyway?

She had very little to go on. Lal said her mother had left her care when she was only three years old. Guardian paperwork was signed. The little baby bassinet switched hands like a dollar bill in her mind. She liked to imagine every inch of her mother. A smiling face, soft hands, and a sweet voice whispering praise. There were no pictures of her around the house. Yuka would give anything just to know what her mother looked like. She yearned to hear a real love story. How her parents fell in love. What brought them together. Haru's daydreams were nice, Titanic was a decent movie, but what was love like in real life? What was the love that created her like?

Lal Mirch always said her mom loved her very much. She stuttered once when Yuka asked about her father. Lal then hurriedly changed the subject.

And then there was that time at the Mafia Ball several years ago, back when she was a preteen. They talked about her mother. Yuka had worn in a beautiful lavender chiffon dress. Lal Mirch had told her to wear a pant suit with a fedora. "Dress more masculine." She felt like Lal was almost trying to disguise her.

But Yuka had wanted to impress Shitt P. Wow! That girl knew how to dress! Pink dyed hair was nothing compared to being a girl shaved practically bald! In the bathroom, she added the extra accessories she had stashed in her purse that Lal Mirch would never let her leave the house with: aerosol hair dye, glitter lip gloss, smoky eye shadow, fake tattoos, clip in hair extensions, fake eyelashes, a kooky glow-in-the-dark purple boa, stick on rhinestones, Kanye West sunglasses, and of course, an inflatable purple inner tube to decorate her waist. A bubble just like Shitt P.'s

But Shitt P. never noticed her at the party. Never stood up for her. "You're nothing but the daughter of a famous slut. How disgraceful." Adelaide frowned, her nose in the air, surrounded by boys dressed in school uniforms and black prefect armbands. "Purify her," she ordered and walked away.

"She looks like a baby who wants to go swimming!" someone shouted, laughing.

Why didn't they say stuff like that about Shitt P.? Yuka and her were dressed similarly that night.

"Let's throw her in the pool!" another whispered.

"Adelaide! Take it back!" she cried, angered by the insult, and she ran through the crowd of chuckling men, chasing the black skirt.

* * *

Xanxus leaned back in his chair, alone in his large and empty study. His raccoon tail skin and red feathers draped over his pristine silk nightshirt as his eyes lazily skimmed through the Mammon's file.

The known history of Kali Mirch.

_Fucking Bitch._

Damn, he hated that woman. He hated her almost as much as his senile old hag. How could both women be mothers? He hoped both were rotting in hell. This slut, Kali, he remembered her, vaguely. She was an old member of Varia. She was allowed to work missions before he took over. She was such the skank flouncing around Vongola parties dressed half-naked, dancing around with men from hundreds of mafia families. Even he had seen her shirtless, breasts bouncing, when he caught her doing her job with one of the guest in a men's bathroom stall. Door shamelessly open.

Anything went in the mafia. _Keep_ _friends, close, enemies closer, and traitors in your bed. _She was in charge of catching traitors.

He took another swig from the bottle of port in his hand. That pathetic cunt. Saying it was part of her job. Bragging that men fell into her arms to give away their secrets. Espionage? Hn. He heard she stole money from their wallets when they weren't looking, while they were staring at her sprawled naked on a motel bed. What a fucking whore. Pathetic shit-faced hag. All tits and ass.

He flipped through the manila folder, reports neatly tagged with post-it notes.

_Family._

_Education._

_Varia Duties._

_Aliases._

_Residences._

_Targets._

_Vendicare Profile._

Vendicare. Bitch was probably PMSing that night. Slit. His. Throat. Funny, how she quit Varia to elope with him. Man must have been one hell of a good fuck, considering, under his corp., she would have been paid high cash to suck dick.

Some black and white photos of the crime scene. Her home. At least, where she used to live. Bitch was lucky to find such a nice place to shack up. He shuffled through the slick photographes. Bloody white bed sheets. Cigars littering the floor. A bottle of cheap whiskey on the nightstand. Every inch of the room covered in semen when scanned with the infrared light. Autopsy found the man's genitals shoved down his throat.

The Vongola had investigated the crime scene separately from the police. The Varia leader back then didn't want the cops to trace the whore back to his assassination squad. A theory spread that the wife was kidnapped, raped, and dumped in some bog or ravine. Not like it wasn't hard to believe. The slut looked like the kind of trash any man would like to fuck in the dirt. So a missing person's report was filed under her name. The shitty police are so easy to fool.

He scowled at their weakness as he continued studying the detailed report.

Her first victim was her husband. Why would anyone want to marry that used trash? She was brimming with the juices of other men. A tree over-urinated on by the neighborhood dogs. But she obviously wasn't satisfied with her one kill. Murders started popping up all over the world.

A few generals in the Sudanese army went missing, and found a week later. Found in bathroom stalls, their heads shoved in toilets. Castrated.

Throats slit wide open.

More murders in New York, wealthy businessmen who dipped into the sex-slave trade. Castrated.

Throats slit wide open.

Even some mafia hitmen fell. All men her former contacts, her former field agents, her former spies within other families. Castrated. All men she had traded sexual favors.

All their throats slit with the same knife.

All castrated, probably with the same knife.

A knife never found.

The killing spree didn't last long though. Only, roughly, a couple months—but hundreds died by her trademark calling card. The case ran cold for lack of fresh evidence. Was the bitch even working alone? She was too good at it. And God knew she could get any idiotic bastard to help her. Now, it seemed like she had disappeared off the face of the planet. Not even the Vendicare prison guards had traced her.

So, the slut had finally gone AWOL. It didn't seem like such a big deal. His squad had eliminated thousands more than she. Xanxus closed the folder and tossed it onto his desk, not caring at all how long it had taken Mammon to compile. He brought the port back to his lips.

"Nnn." No sweet alcohol welcomed his tongue. Empty. He threw the tinted wine bottle hard into the fireplace, causing it to shatter into a million pieces. The fire flared up briefly, fueled by the alcohol, then settled obediently back into its place.

Kali Mirch. She probably killed herself. That fucking bitch.

But damn, did she make a name.

And then, Suwana Yuka appeared. Lal Mirch tried to pass her off as some brat she adopted. But rumors spread that the blonde girl actually was Colonnello's.

But that just didn't make sense. Just because they were not married, they deny it?

And so, another, darker rumor also spread.

She was Kali's.

A frown graced Xanxus's horseradish-bitter face. This girl's whore of a mother dumped her. Abandoned her like a piece of rotting trash. No clue of her father's whereabouts, let alone identity. The woman seemed to have beheaded every cock that entered her.

He could easily imagine the hatred and wrath that brewed in Yuka's heart.

Her hatred and wrath just as intoxicating as his own.

* * *

Yuka rushed down the staircase, the door to the roof slamming behind her. She had to sprint to the gym—FAST. She had dozed off, wondering what her mother was like. Where was she? What she was doing that very moment? Was she in some other country, or perhaps right next door, watching over her? She liked the sound of her second thought better. It made her feel loved.

But she couldn't be such a lackadaisical dreamboat. Today was a very important day. Today, Ryohei and the boxing club would be practicing with her dance club. She had to get down fast and negotiate the chaos, knowing the boxing captain's utter cluelessness. She didn't have much time. Less than ten minutes, to be precise. Yuka couldn't be late for her detention with Mr. Sunshine and Rainbows. Man, she'd do anything to skip. Facing the cloud guardian would be awkward.

_I should have gone to class. Then I could have given Hana instructions. Then, I wouldn't be worrying._

She sprinted across the courtyard, bursting into the gym.

_Why on Earth are they in boxing outfits?_ The boxing team, half-naked in their polyester boxing shorts, some with towels around their necks, sat patiently waiting on the bleachers. She figured Ryohei didn't tell them until last minute. Your typical Ryohei. The dance club girls, more glammed up than usual, had changed out of their uniforms, and into pretty little outfits with butterfly and flower prints. They were clustered shyly together on the opposite side of the gym from the boys.

How classic. Yuka smiled wryly.

Finally, she caught sight of the boxing club captain, and, well, she didn't know what to think of him anymore. To say the least, she forgave him for his cluelessness. He was dressed like the rest of his club, but she never knew he had such a nice body. Toned to perfection! Without his shirt, she could see every muscle clearly defined on his well-shaped body. His silver hair contrasted majestically against his bronze, chiseled torso. It irked her a little.

Why was he so confident without his shirt off, while for her, just the thought of such nakedness, made her want to cry? Why couldn't she walk around shirtless without feeling exposed and laid open? Without feeling humiliated?

"HEY YUKA!" He called her name loudly while trotting to her side.

"Are you wearing a boys' school uniform?" Hana asked, approaching her from where the girls stood. She was dressed in an elegant skirt and satin blouse.

"Ugh, long story" Yuka explained, embarrassed. "I can't stay long. I just came to set everyone up." She wished she were dressed more appropriately. Yuka began to grow self-conscious in Hibari's jacket. It was so black and drab. It fit her horribly, too. The inside lining was itchy. It was meant to be worn with a layer of clothing underneath, after all. Not just a bra.

"How are we going to break the ice?" she asked. Everyone in the room looked expectantly at the two club captains. Ryohei grinned bashfully at her, while Yuka caught her breath. His pecs rippled under his tanned skin.

"You guys should start?" Hana said warmly.

"START THE MUSIC!" Ryohei hollered, a goofy grin filling his face. The boys sitting on the bleachers turned the shiny new stereo on. It had almost drained the club's expenses, but Yuka thought the investment would be worth it. Soon, her detention debt would be paid, and she could spend every afternoon in the gym, dancing her heart into the clouds. A spicy Salsa hummed through the room, brassy trumpets defining the rhythm.

Yuka showed Ryohei how to put one hand around her waist and with the other hold her hand. The other couples followed her example, the girls teaching the boys. Salsa was probably the best dance to teach amateurs. The steps could be simple or extravagant. "1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4" she counted for the boxer. Ryohei, was a little clumsy at first, getting the hang of the movements. It was adorable how he apologized for stepping on her foot. And it was a nice change—to be in the lead.

The music was loud and energizing. She was having so much fun, laughing that it was ok, laughing that it didn't hurt when he was clumsy. Finally, a truly wonderful partner. He learned fast, too. Soon, she taught him how to spin her, and they flew to the sound of the music.

* * *

Suddenly, the gym blacked-out and the music cut from the power outage.

"Everyone out! Go home!" Kusakabe's voice, magnified by a megaphone, echoed through the dark spacious room. Ryohei let her waist go, but held her hand tighter, trying to reassure her.

_I forgot!_

"It's the disciplinary committee!" a boxer shouted, as the lights flickered on. Kusakabe and a band of black-jacketed prefects had gathered in the large gymnasium. The girls screamed, noticing that some of the boys were already knocked unconscious. The boxers tried to protect their dancing partners while leading them out, but the funny haired prefects, all delinquents who knew how Hibari liked his shows run, smashed through the crowd with pummeling fists.

Yuka was frozen, horrified that she had lost herself in the moment. She pulled Ryohei by the hand. She wouldn't let him get caught by the brutal disciplinary committee. This was her mistake. There was an exit, a hole in the concrete foundation, in the girls' locker room. They could squeeze out.

But Ryohei didn't let her pull him. He anchored his feet, looking over his shoulder.

"MY TEAM!" They were being battered by the delinquents in a mob-scene of riotous proportions. The boxing captain ripped his hand away, running to aid his boxing club in the brawl.

"NO! RYOHEI!" Yuka shouted running after him. She didn't reach for her pocket knife. She didn't plan to fight, just to get Ryohei out safely.

This was all her fault.

No. What was she thinking? This was all _his_ fault. Hibari Kyoya's fault.

Where was he?

And where was Ryohei? She had lost him. Frantically, she searched, avoiding bouts between boxers and prefects. Finally, she saw Kusakabe dragging Ryohei's unconscious body outside the gym exit. She rushed to follow.

She slammed the gym double-doors open. Kusakabe sat on the ground a distance from the ruckus. The loud roars of the wrestling boys could be heard behind her and the subtle squeaking of her startled girls came from the courtyard they were huddled in.

Through all this, Yuka's face was exploding magma with crimson rage.

_He_ would PAY!

* * *

Kusakabe was busy trying to revive Ryohei, but the boy was knocked out cold, having taking a solid hit in the head. Hibari had order him specifically to watch out for the sun guardian. Maybe he ought to run to the local convenience store to get some ice. And he might as well pick up some ice for everyone. There were bound to be loads of bruises on the clubbers who dared to crowd. But as he made to turn around, he was confronted by the rather red-faced transfer student, the girl who just kept on surprising him.

"You know him well, don't you?" she said in a very low, very slow voice, while clawing his jacket. "Where is Hibari Kyoya?"

Why was she wearing Kyoya's jacket? He recognized the golden metal buttons immediately. Only Hibari's had personalized golden buttons. If she had his jacket, it could only mean…

Was she important to him? He translated her low tone as urgent.

"He's in the reception room finishing up some paper work."

"Thank you," she said through clenched teeth, and he realized in now. The girl before him radiated a carnivorous aura. Her tone reminded him of Hibari at the highest level of irritation, a low and slow rumble. Should he run ahead of her to warn the prefect, or head to convenience store to help Ryohei? He stalled in indecision as he watched Yuka stalk off to the reception room.

The convenience store pulled him. Hibari was strong. The prefect would be irritated if he went against orders and left Ryohei.

But Yuka's voice still worried him. There is a certain power in someone speaking so quietly, hushed, and deadly, instead of shouting loudly and hysterically. Like simultaneous outrage and self-control.

Scary.

* * *

"YOU!" she raged, pointing at the prefect. Her feelings were no longer muddled and confused. She knew her heart now.

Hibari looked up from the papers on his desk, eyes narrowed with annoyance at the disturbing girl. Yuka stood in the reception room doorway, irate, scarlet splotches once more percolating to her face, eyes uncontrollably watering with intense emotion and frustration.

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING!" She cried, walking brusquely across the dim room toward the window shades she had the sudden urge to rip down. _Him_ and his goddamn darkness. The prefect rose from his chair as she whisked by, withdrawing a tonfa from a drawer. Yuka whipped off her glasses and threw them with all her might at the cloud guardian, wanting him to sit back down again, to be lower than her, but he just deflected the missile with a tonfa. She didn't care if the glasses broke as she heard them smash to the ground. Screw it all! She stormed over to the shades. Those dark shades made this room his. They made her angry. He doesn't own this school! He had no right to crash her dance club, finish it in that insulting mob of chaos. With both hands she grabbed the Venetian blinds, and pulled down with all her strength. The vinyl window shades crashed to the floor, leaving gaping holes where they were attached to the ceiling. Light flooded into the room, illuminating all its hidden corners. Exposing all its mysteries. It really was just a simple room, in the end.

The catastrophic view outside reminded her why she stomped up two flights of stairs to the reception room, very tempted along the way to pull the fire alarm and kick the walls. In the courtyard, Hana was trying to pick up Ryohei and her club's new stereo was being carried out in crumbled, wiry pieces by some prefects. What would happen to dance club now? There wasn't even enough money in the club's bank account for a new boom box.

"WHAT'S THIS?" she thundered, pointing out the window pane. Turning around, she was caught pinned across the chest by his tonfa, her back hard pushed against the glass. His face was frosted with a new harsh impatience that she had never seen before. Like he was the one wronged? How could that be? He started this fiasco!

"Don't damage school property," his voice cold and controlled, referring to the blinds. "And I warned you, if you disturbed the peace again, I would disband your club." He scrutinized the only girl he had allowed to knot his tie, the first time with such sweet tenderness and the second time with such entertaining defiance. "And you were skipping detention again."

What a lame excuse! Yuka was no longer going to take his shit.

"You can't just do whatever you want," she growled menacingly in reply. Her hand wrapped fearlessly around Hibari's tonfa, trying to relieve the pressure.

"No. I can. How long is it going to take you to realize that?" And pressure of his tonfa increased two-fold. He looked like he had spoken the truth. The ultimate truth. No arguing.

But Yuka only smirked back devilishly, her mauve eyes glinting with sad laughter, avoiding his own. Here she was eating the biggest pile of steaming shit ever served to her on a shining silver platter. Her beloved dance club was dissolved. Her Salsa partner was knocked unconscious. And Ryohei was only trying to help his friends.

Her heart throbbed heatedly in her chest.

How she had let him control her.

THROB.

How she had let him defile her.

THROB.

How pathetic she was.

THROB.

How weak.

THROB.

And she gave up on the steel tonfa, opting for his spotless shirt. She was so jealous. Just so jealous. It looked like it never suffered any rips or tears. It never needed any scars to be sewn up. Why did hers always have to be so battered? Her hand shot out like lightening, grappling the fabric over his chest. Over his heart. Her fingers were clamped like an oyster protecting its pearl. Quickly, she yanked the prefect close to her, overcoming his stubborn strength with the willpower of a suicidal rebellion.

Today, she would give her LIFE to win. To conquer. To earn back what she loved. To come out on top with her heart beating _alive_ in her throat.

And she was so strong, so strong fueled by these profound forces. So strong driven by her deepest desires. Hibari couldn't pull back in time. He couldn't even catch himself, tripping towards her, his feet too slow for his head. His eyes still hurting from the sudden bright light. His belt buckle slammed into her stomach, his tonfa falling behind her to prevent himself from dropping inches closer. And this intimacy, this indulgent proximity, was his weakness. It was dizzying. It was confusing. His body ached where everything mattered. Because when Hibari was so close, so grinding close to her, his hips pressing on her soft stomach, his head hovering over her pink neck, he didn't want to hurt her anymore. He didn't want to punish her. Hibari Kyoya just wanted to bury himself in her, touch her supple shoulders with his lips and her warm body with his hands. Feel her squeezing his hand wrapped around his, tight and earnest with desire. With something more than desire.

And while his eyes clouded and that heavy, sticky lump grew in the back of his mouth, Yuka's knife flew to his throat like the teeth of a rabid dog.

"I hate you!" she cried through tears. "I abhor you! Detest you!" The words wretched with pain. The jade handle's deep purple color swirled darker and darker as she pressed the sharp metal against his neck. "...Loathe you with everything in me!" It was the weakness. The exposure. No one would ever strip her. She had to stop him for good, because if he could take away her dance club and her self-control, what would be next?

Her honor? Because she could feel it now. The second hardness against her stomach. The one just below his belt buckle and made her all too aware of his intent.

He was just another man.

"Go to hell!" she seethed, perfectly ready to cut open his neck. Wanting to put this devil in his place. To cast him far, far away and forget about him. Horror edged up her spine from the touch of his erection.

Murder broke open her heart.

"Go to hell!" her voice cracking with hatred.

But as her words spilled forth, the knife's blade turned to hot misty vapor, melting back into the handle. Denying her the freedom. Dropping her from where she clung on the edge the cliff. Her heart seemed to choke, then painfully burn. Burn. Burn. Burn. Her knees buckled and she fell helplessly. Was she dying? Every ounce of strength drained from her body as she collapsed onto the floor. She lay at Hibari's feet, exhaustion sweeping over her as she squeezed the jade handle. She was too tired to care what happened now. Every muscle of her body was contracting, tightening, flaming pain consuming her heart.

And then—release.

Hibari had kicked the switchblade out of her hand and it skidded to the far side of the room. Then a long silence. Was he still there? Her skin was insensitive and deadened. Almost a corpse. She waited, her body folded over her knees, her forehead kissing the dirty floor. She heard his footsteps around the room, pat-pat-pat, vibrating against her temple.

Were they following her heartbeat?

She couldn't feel her heartbeat anymore.

Was she even still alive? Yes. Tears of frustration, welled in her cheeks. All her strength in her eyes. In her eyelids squeezed tight. Then, a light covering was thrown on top of her. A blanket? Her white shirt. And then, the sound of the door clicking softly shut.

And for a long time, she laid in the empty reception room, crying out the agony in her breast as the light streamed through the window. Her knuckles turned white from hitting the hard wood floor. Pounding it. She lay until the sun began to set, until darkness returned, twilight approaching.

Then, slowly, she picked herself up. Feeling returned like prickling pins and needles against her skin. The sensation made her woozy. Shaking, she unbuttoned the prefect's coat and slid it off her shoulders, feeling returning to her numbed mind and her cold body. She was returning to herself. Shivering, she brought her arms through her own uniform's shirt. Murder still shrouded her mind with its dark ominous mist.

What would she do with Hibari's jacket?

Destroy it.

Because all she wanted was to forget. All she wanted was to be free of him and all these rules that ate her up.

And she imagined, smiling, the jacket sinking blurry into the depths of the Namimori River.


	9. Las Verónicas

Las Verónicas

"What did you just call me?"

His voice was calm and passive, low in volume, each word unhurriedly pronounced. A sparkle of irritation ran like a TNT fuse through his concrete gaze. Was he threatening? Hibari Kyoya did not have to be threatening to _be threatening_. Only cowards used threats. His cold sobriety, his lowered chin, his patient, dark eyes. And those tonfas, like a bull's poised horns, gave him that inherent confidence. Purple clouds nestled in a pink sky. It was getting late and many of the pedestrians had scurried back home. Few, now, roamed the streets of Namimori's shopping district.

Challenge vibrated through the humid air, the bridge a battle ring, a circle focusing them in the center, everything real, everything tangible, beyond the edge of this world. It was a confrontation of sorts, only soundless.

They did not speak for a while.

They did not paw the ground.

The only movement came from the fabric of their clothes.

The aloof prefect stood stone-still with intensity, not daring to back away, and yet, warily keeping his distance. His simple, furrowed eyes—was he studying a strange and unusual bug?

Seconds ticked by and she couldn't bear to look at him, twisting the railing she clung to. For some reason, that feeling had never left. That feeling of falling. Of not having anything to hold onto. Sure, her mind was strong. It had never been so resolute, so set like the roots of a tree. Something was eroding the soil, loosening it, making her wobble. But her body was weak everywhere from her previous outburst. She could feel her movements delayed, like pushing through viscous syrup. She could only grind her teeth, frustrated by her weakness. Her inability.

"Why are you here?" The tremble in her voice was impossible to disguise. Why did she feel like she was on the verge of crying? The welling of a tear began to form. She kept it hidden, choked it down.

Never again would he pull any emotion out of her.

_"You must learn how to bear pain and suffering stoically."_

"I came for my jacket. Where is it?" His tone was more casual, or at least, normal. He was already stowing away his tonfas. Why wasn't he scared of her? Hell, she had almost killed him like some screaming, crying, shaking loon. Ugh… had she cackled like a witch, like a freakish Chuckie doll? The memory was making her sick with shame… Was this just another way he had stolen her self-control?

_What had gotten into me?_

Her stomach capsized. She really had almost _killed_ him.

_KILL._

It's a pretty big word.

"You better hand it over." His eyes alighted on Yuka's book bag like it was already his. Like there was no way she could resist him. Like there was no way she could ever hold any kind of power over him. Like he really could do whatever he wanted, take what he pleased, neither fear nor ability ever an obstacle.

The bastard cloud had no self-restraint. No ounce of respect. She meant nothing to him. _She_ meant nothing to him. How could she matter if he treated her like some slave? Without respect. Without freakin' honor and dignity.

And Yuka hated him to hell for this, burning with something more than jealousy, craving something more than revenge, but… _how close was hate to murder?_

How much was hate equal to actually _killing_?

To cutting out a heart from a chest, smelling the salty blood and putrid intestines _all over her_?

How much did it take to cross that line? Heck, didn't he get the message that she hated him? He ought to stay away or she might lose control again. And the fear… the fear that she had no power over her own body, her own identity, scared her shitless. She grew paler and paler, white as mold as he approached in even padded steps. This detestation. This fear. This confusion. It wasn't good for her arteries. It wasn't good for her heart. She didn't have any protection, any weapon, any defense, her knife lost. She couldn't find it in the reception room. Hibari probably had it.

"My jacket?" he requested again, laid-back and unthreatened in front of the person who had attempted to take much more than his coat. Yuka had expected him to be harsher. Still, she gulped down her doubt like bad medicine. _Bad guy. Bad guy. Bad guy._

"If you give me my knife, I'll gladly return your clothing," Yuka promised, her voice rock solid stoic. Of course, she would never return his ugly jacket. The fish were actually nibbling the red silk lining just below the water's surface. "It's important to me."

"Hn. You mean that fake blade?" He replied. "Only I can have weapons on school property." Damn, she wanted to leave. But he was right there. Right next to her now, one hand on the railing, the other in his pocket. He leaned over her. Whether she swore never to run away or not, she could easily be caught.

"You _lied_ when you said you hated me." Yuka pushed herself against the railing. Like his word was the only one that mattered! The nerve! His eyes, no matter how piercing, could not see through her.

"I _hate_ you, I do," she seethed in reply, shifting her body only to be blocked by his arm that grabbed the metal behind her, caging her in. And her hands loosened their grip on the wrought iron, her anger supporting her. "You know why?" she challenged, tone rising with sing-song sarcasm, sourly facing him. She sounded a lot like Heidi, but she was too irate to notice. "All you care about are your stupid rules and your stupid school. You don't care about anyone else!" Yuka practically snorted her abhorrence, raising her finger to jab him in the chest. "You don't care about what other people want. You don't care about other people's feelings." She had no more tears left. All had turned to numb resentment, her heart unraveling. "You ruined my club, you hurt my friends, and you treat me like some little _whore_!"

There.

She said it.

_Whore._

Her lips were no longer virgin, their sanctity thrown away in the heat of the moment. All her cards on the table. She wasn't asking for pity, she was asking for _respect_. The word made Hibari look up, something clicking in the flash of his eyes while Yuka's cheeks heated up and she turned her back to him. Would he ever see her as a human being instead of some toy, some body? She deserved to be on his level. She thought she could at least have that recognition.

And she really ought to be crying.

Where were her tears?

Oh, they were there. Heck, she wouldn't be such a wreck if they weren't. She would be insane if they weren't._ But they were there._ They ran slowly, barely visible, eroding her strength like groundwater through limestone. This great, slow river trickled every time some guy wolf whistled, every time some guy stared at her, visualizing her naked. It leaked every time Lal Mirch told her she was a fool because of the way she dressed. Mud slides choked her ego every time she was taught her sole purpose in life was to make some man happy, her heart tied to his foot with a red string. A string that never broke no matter how much she twisted and thrashed. Even the strongest of fish cannot pull a boat forever, circled by sharks and tangled in line. Some fisherman out there could beat her to a bloody pulp and it would still be her duty to brew his tea and warm his bed.

So that gushing river was already there, fueled by a spring of groundwater hopes. She was born a girl, and that lack of Y chromosome practically determined her fate. No matter how defiant or rebellious her shell, Yuka was fighting a rip tide that would someday outdo her endurance. Today, she was exhausted, overwhelmed, hushed and shaking, cold, despondent, tired tired tired.

_Whore._

That one little word, rooted as deep and ancient as civilization, had evaporated all her strength and confidence like some cursed spell.

_Whore._

Behind her, darkness shadowed the prefect's face, growing silent like the plume from ground zero in an old black and white film. This new frown was not enhanced by any hatred of crowds, herbivores, or pathetic people without the strength to stand alone on their own two feet. It was not influenced by some bastard illusionist with an annoying, mocking chuckle.

_Whore._

Hibari Kyoya was fifteen years old. He was the high and mighty head prefect of Namimori Middle school. He was the drifting cloud, strongest of the Vongola guardians. But right now, he stood a grumbling and irritated teenager. A little sour patch kid, trying to reach the sugar on the highest shelf of the cupboard. The world was so incomprehensible. Where did he mess up? In this road trip of life, he sulked in the back seat of a car named chick-magnet, denied shotgun. He passively brooded, his soul taking a moment to think. Hell, he just wanted to touch her, fix it with his hands the way she fixed him by just _being in front of him_. All he could focus on was the girl who had stolen his tonfa.

"I'm a _whore_ because of you." Yuka had her arms crossed over her stomach, hips leaning on the railing turned away from him. _Because of you._ Everything. All her suffering. All her problems. They were _his_ entire fault. Was he so stupid to have never realized this? Only silence stood behind her. She pictured him basking in her misery. In her servitude. The sadist.

_Whore. _She could imagine him saying it in his mind. Feel it creep through his silence.

_Whore. Whore. Dirty slut. Just Like...  
_

"You are hardly. Who insulted a Namimori student?" It was throaty, a pubescent crack mixed in with the demand. His earthy scent buried her alive as he pulled her tripping towards him, pulled her from something sinister she had fallen into. This wasn't the reaction she expected, but… but he had no right to be so touchy! It was practically self-contradictory, to say she wasn't a slut and then to feel her up. Scales of justice weighed on her side. Murder with REASON!

"You did, you ass! Let me go!" She whirled around, her hands raised to his chest to instinctively push him off. Hibari was in her bubble again. It was a very special bubble. Anybody who dared break through it was usually beaten to a pulp. But it wasn't that easy with this guy. The cloud guardian stood permanent like coastline rock, steadfast despite years of pounding waves.

"You're an idiot if this is bothering you," he said slowly, not letting go of his arm around her waist. He put a firm hand over hers, the one planted on his chest trying to hold him back. Carefully, he lifted it, pressing his thumb into the pads of her palm, squeezing it gently. Earnestly. But Yuka only balled her fist, defiant and unreceptive.

_'IDIOT?' _ This treatment damn near hell bothered her and she was no idiot! Just because she may—_may_—be attracted to him, he had this right over her. This… This… This… ownership. This license to do whatever he wanted. This complete access to her body?

"What if I don't like this touching? You don't even ask."

"Then may I?" He brought the hand to his lips, feathering them over a knuckle, eyes closed. He felt like a lion nipping at her neck, but still human. Still human.

"Y-you think it's that easy? You think I can just be buttered up?"

Oh, the way he kept her pinned! Like he really thought he was asking her permission? Did she really have any choice? No one had ever given her a choice! Not Lal Mirch, not Reborn, not Squalo, and most definitely not the Midori faculty. No, she was always stuck in her tar pit, held in place by whole crowd of people.

"You know, I hate this chit-chat."

Yuka was looking down at the ground when he pushed a ring into her balled fist, making her eyes widen in surprise.

"Only because you've survived this long." Her mother's ring seemed to pulse in her hand. "I don't mean to hinder you."

And with that, his grip on her loosened. She could so easily pull away. She could so easily slam her knee between his legs. She could so easily escape. But something new kept her tied. A string so fine, so spider silk thin, she had never even felt it dig in until now. Something _begged _her. She could feel his resolution _begging_ her.

"What? Do you hate me even more?" The husky sulk in his voice was only partially hidden. "Then fight—"

"Young love. I didn't think you had it in you, Kyoya. Kufufu~" Hibari wheeled around, tonfas immediately in hand, barely avoiding a pike jabbed at his back. A European boy in a Kokuyo Middle uniform stood behind him. Yuka would have mistaken him for a tourist, if it weren't for the uniform… and a pedestrian, if it weren't for trident. Was he Varia? He wasn't in any of the pictures of men Lal Mirch had warned her about.

"Illusionist. I'll bite you to death."

* * *

In front of a wall of television screens, the rotating chair slowly came to a rest as coffee from a sideways mug drip-drip-dripped onto the floor.

* * *

"Oh ho? Kyoya, I always find you so interesting. But I regret to say I am not here to entertain you." Still the aggressive swipes preoccupied him. "I actually have a favor to return to our little friend by the railing." However, the prefect, had already put her aside, completely invested in trying to break through this strange foreigner's defenses.

"How about you return it after I call an ambulance?"

The two boys were everywhere, all over the bridge at once! Which way to go, left or right? It was her chance to get away now, to get alone, to think. She couldn't understand the new boy's strange accent, but inwardly, she thanked him for interrupting them. Now was her chance to get out of here! But she had never seen the prefect so… distant. Did he really have someone he hated as much as she hated him? Hate. The word felt like crumbly chalk in her mind.

So she kept watching, feeling different now, freer, somehow, now that the ring was safe in her hand. It was way more important than the knife. The ring meant something now. It was more than an heirloom now. It was what kept her glued to the spot. Somehow, the foreigner always seemed to irritate Hibari more, a tight-rope walker on the bridges railing while he fought, a general who rode high on his horse. Was he a former student? Did he used to belong to the Disciplinary Committee or something? He did have a funny haircut. He had more range than Namimori's prefect with that long weapon.

Hibari couldn't seem to reach him. His tonfas were too short.

Still, they were so evenly matched. Was it possible for someone to exist who was more powerful than that jerk? She vowed never to fall into his hands. No. Now would be a good time to run. But it was like she was stuck in a circle, running in a wheel. He had returned the ring. He had _returned_ it. That meant something.

And, hell, she couldn't forget him now.

She just couldn't.

No matter how much she wanted to. Why was it so much harder to break from that circle? Her mind's eye, a glowing ring… the touching… isolated in that dark, cavernous reception room. If his glare was so cold, why were his hands so warm? It felt so good. He felt so good. It was impossible to forget. Impossible to suppress. Her memories breached the surface like stubborn buoys. Who was she kidding?

Her world revolved around his steady eyes, separated by that singular curl of hair. Her hand rolled around the ring. Was it really hers again? _Yes! _The waves seemed to applaud below.

"You're early."

"EH! Auntie?" Yuka spun around, only to be whacked on the head.

"What's going on here?" Lal Mirch asked in her stern drawl as she pointed at the two fighting boys.

"Uh… nothing…." She almost blushed. She could never let Lal see her blush. Ever.

"Are you a fool?" Lal Mirch slapped the dazed and off-balance Yuka with a quick hand, while her tongue listed off everything the girl did wrong. "You are getting caught up in your old ways. You never learn. Don't you ever let your guard down! Didn't I teach you better?"

"What? What do you mean?" Behind her, the foreigner got a stab at Hibari's shoulder. Hibari barely flinched, though, as if it were merely a pinprick.

"You have no sense! There are cameras everywhere and here I find you gawking at a mafia fight!"

Hibari smashed through one of the railings with such force that he bent the metal, making it look like a car had crashed into the spot. Good thing the stranger had neatly evaded.

"W-what do you mean cameras? I thought the Varia only—ay—CAN'T BREATHE!" Her aunt interrupted her with a very old, fancy, whale bone corset strung around her stomach, tightening it, and tying up the back laces. "LAL?"

"Reborn told me about the cameras this afternoon. We aren't training here. I've rented a boat in the harbor."

"WHAT?"

"It's to practice breathing when your lungs are under immense pressure. Where is your swimsuit? Didn't I tell you to come prepared?" The tight fabric suffocated her and the bone dug into her ribcage.

"Follow me," Lal ordered and walked away, expecting Yuka to follow wordlessly. However, both froze to see the prefect fly past them and into the brick wall that belonged to a jewelry store.

"Kufufu~I owe you a favor for helping my dear Chrome," a cobra-smooth voice said behind her. Upon the mention of Chrome's name, she noticed the resemblance.

"Are you Chrome's brother?"

"I am Mukuro Rokudo," he smiled and held out her mother's pocket knife in his gloved hand. "It's a more powerful illusion than it appears. I've had a lot of fun with it. I wouldn't return it, if I didn't owe you a favor." Still, smiling he pushed it into her hand, and on touch, Yuka's eyes rolled up into her head. "But still, I think its meant for you." All vision disappeared, all into darkness, a black chasm. Black and deep and dark, filled with shivers.

_In the misty darkness._

_Retching. Stomach turned inside out._

_A flood gushing from her mouth of putrid, sour acid._

_A cold pressure under her chin._

_An anchor tied to her feet. _

_She didn't want to go down, because up was where she had come from._

_Metal around her wrist._

_A white porcelain bowl._

_Tile._

_Blood._

_Mixed with the zingy scent of vomit._

_She was handcuffed to a pipe, water leaking out from where it was loose._

_She pulled, she pulled._

_Something cracked._

_Her skull against the toilet bowl. Her teeth studded the floor._

_A hand and a mask above her._

_Again._

_Again._

_No control. No stopping._

_She couldn't feel it anymore. Her jaw had gone numb, shattered._

_Used to the pain._

_And then nothing._

_She was still alive, soaking in the mixture on the floor._

_She was naked, too._

_But she always had been, hadn't she?_

The world flooded back, pushing her eyes open, bringing her back to her rag-doll twisted body. She was missing a chunk of time. She didn't remember how the steel carving knife embedded itself in her bleeding arm. Broken glass all over the floor... Where was the bridge? The embellished, corset, faded a festive red and gold, sagged, no longer quite so constricting, but still wrapped around her middle. The laces had exploded out of the fabric. Lal Mirch was nowhere to be seen. Nowhere to be heard. The air was still, muffled. Had the storm passed or was still yet to come? Where was everyone? She had moved, she was not at the bridge, but she couldn't remember what had happened. How did she get here? She could only remember the darkness.

Where did the switchblade get to? It had just been in her hand. She looked around, but only found sharp glass shards, useless jewelry, wedding rings, diamond earrings - the jewelry store. Cases were broken and smashed. Knives studded the wall behind her. How come she only had _one_ in her arm? There were thousands embedded in the walls the floor, as deep as the lesion she was too horrified to look at. Her hand went to the handle to remove the instrument, but her fingers were uncoordinated and knocked it.

Suddenly, the shooting pain in her arm reached her brain, and Yuka ground her teeth, staring at her gored flesh, the blood flowing to the beat of her heart, some already starting to crust around the blade. It was so sharp, so piercing, so disgustingly inserted into her body, but still, the tears refused to come.

It was like it wasn't her body.

That good old trick Lal Mirch had always taught her.

Her good arm threw itself out, grappling for a hold from a pile of crumbled bricks, the dust of the mortar still in the air. The bridge was right in front of her, across the street. She saw it through a hole in the wall. But she had no memory... no memory...

"VOOOOIIIII!—" came from the distance, but she couldn't hear the words that followed the familiar battle cry. How was it familiar? The shouter's name danced on the the tip of her tongue. She had heard it only a few days ago. The world was muffled, lost in deep, black fuzz. Even though her vision was perfectly clear, everything still looked different. The shadows stood out more. She turned her head to the vibrations of thumps and smashes in the distance, down the road.

And the door jingled, the tinkle for a new costumer, and she turned around, her sore neck stiff.

He was more bruised and beaten than she had ever seen him.

Out of Hibari's back, many silver carving knives, like the one in her arm, like the ones decorating the sheetrock of the destroyed store, disappeared under his skin. Blood dripped down like colorful streamers, making his white shirt look dark and leathery. His tonfas were folded to his side like a bird's closed wings.

_The hand and the mask._

Something aligned in her sight. Two images fused into one. A dark figure, solid and strong and threatening, power with a 'P' that spit. It was like she had never seen him before until this day. He was only a stranger, an animal that needed to be slaughtered. _He_ was the anchor. _He_ was the handcuff. Everything about him was wrong. Everything about him needed to disappear.

Her hand reached out to a metal pipe for support, but her eyes never left him, like empty fishbowls, translucent and new and empty empty empty. He was smirking as he approached her, smirking painlessly, moving effortlessly despite the cold metal in his back. And all she saw were the tonfas threatening to pierce her just like the metal in her arm. They were threatening to bash her skull in again. Again. Again. FEAR rippled up her spine. She check her clothes. No… she wasn't naked, but she damn felt like everything had been ripped off. That she stood bare before him, still collapsed on some tile floor. Would she never escape? His hand was heavy against her shoulder, pushing her against the wall. His mouth leaning down, moving over unheard words. Something different in his eyes.

Just different.

The red blood, oozing from her wound, dark and velvety, was the only place his head was turned.

The damn fixated beast. He stepped on her feet, he cut apart her life. Memories fresh of pain and hurt were all she could remember. The vile oil on top of her ocean. Her hand. It was the only spot on her body that was warm. It was the only spot on her body that could feel this pulsing life. This screaming life. It screamed as Hibari leaned lower and lower over her.

And there it was.

There it was.

The _black_ switchblade.

In _her_ hand.

In _his_ chest.

Reaching towards his most vital organ.

And she didn't have to pull it out because it had already misted away. Some purpose achieved, deflating into its vapor. The cloud guardian slumped onto her shoulder, gone to exhaustion. And with this vision, the bloody, Shakespearean vision, wreathed in the overwhelming weight of his body leaning against hers, something lifted. Something rose away, into the clouds.

BANG!

Luminous clouds of pink pink smoke. And next to the prefect fell the trademark weapon of a butterfingered Bovino.

* * *

Hours later, at the Namimori emergency room, one boy leaned against the wall scowling, blood still on the shoulder of his sweater. Not his blood, of course. The other three sat on the white chairs.

"The weapon came close to his heart, but stopped before it could go too far."

"A-are you sure?" the shortest asked.

"He's very lucky. He'll be fine. He just needs to rest."

"The Varia idiots are insane," the boy against the wall muttered.

"Is Lal still looking for Yuka?"

"...Yeah. She should have returned after being hit with the Ten-year Bazooka."

An older boy in a black jacket, a torn look on his face, slipped the doctor one last worried question. Then, he left the emergency room, heading to investigate the bridge, anxiously flipping his cell phone open and shut, open and shut.

* * *

Yuka's hands reached out to shards of a floral tea cup. She couldn't place what had happened. One moment, she was dancing on cloud nine, eyes lifted, cheeks puffed with a smile, and the next, she couldn't keep the tears from flowing. Hell, she was torn apart, ripped to shreds on the inside and out, because with whatever had lifted away, it had taken the last of her wall, of her great great dam. The great clog, like a crusty scab, had fallen away.

Everything emptied out onto the kitchen tile like the hot liquid from the broken china teapot, the herbal fluid mixing with the blood from her arm. She couldn't help it, her voice shrieked as she cried.

She wished she had never done it.

Hell, she didn't even know why she had even done it.

The knife had entered so easily.

And now…

It was all over. He was dead. She knew he was dead.

What about the ring?

Why had she forgotten?

He had given the ring back to her.

_Why had she forgotten?_

_Why?_

Something strong lifted her up. Strong and big like a bull. Was it _him_? He yanked the knife quickly from her arm, making her screech and fresh tears streamed forth. Tears came so easily. The hold on her wasn't hesitating, but neither was it comforting. It was so dark. Her eyes were closing. Black hair brushed her cheek as he lifted her.

"Hi-Hibari?" she hiccuped.

"Genkishi," the man said mechanically.

* * *

_**Author's Note: Concerning the timeline, I am sending Yuka roughly a two weeks ahead of Tsuna into the future. This promises the availability of a Cloud Guardian who is not at the base. Perhaps, he is not even in Namimori.  
**_


	10. Contact

**Warning: Hints and spoilers of the future arc and choice arc are in the following chapters.**

**

* * *

**

Contact

Hibari Kyoya sat at his desk in a chair. The seat was old and worn, soft with time. His chair faced the window and fog condensed on the window pane. The morning was very quiet and still, but was cracked every few moments by the twitter of a bird.

Inside, the room was clean and warm and embers of a fire crackled in the corner. On the desk sat an address book held together by twine, several folded newspapers, a steeping cup of tea, stationary, and a pen. He picked up the pen, took a piece of paper and began to write.

* * *

Yuka couldn't move her arm in the hard, plaster bandage. Her eyelids hung half open, her entire body shut down, crashed in a sense, more like a computer than any car—she looked fine on the outside. Her blood pressure was low, too low, and the White Spell Nurse made a note of it as she checked the vitals.

Then, the uniformed practitioner carefully flicked the needle, making sure no air bubbles were in the painkiller, and then, she inserted it into the IV tube that dipped under the girl's bandage. The clear medicine was like the water under a frozen lake. It was no laughing gas, just numbness that shut down nervous system. Yuka's eyelids closed fully by the time the nurse emptied the syringe.

Thoughtfully stepping away, the she wondered if this child truly was the same woman, the same Yuka, so sedated, and yet, still bursting with so much pain.

* * *

A clean, crisp note sat on the corner of his podium. A piece of hay in his mouth, the strong-chinned man handed out the weekly assignments to the members of the Foundation. They were all smart and able men. Some were lawyers, some were police officers, some were civilian vigilantes, and some were still in high school. All had proven their worth to his boss. All had earned some bit of respect from the isolated cloud. He was proud of them.

After the meeting, he called a young man over. The police officer bowed and Kusakabe handed him the note.

* * *

Rest, rest.

To her left, the clear IV tube attached to the dripping bag of saline.

To her right, a bedside table with a bouquet of lilies and poppies, get well soon cards with computer typed messages.

The color gray washed the floor and the walls, and even the window had a tinted film, the sky outside neutral. The clean, salty, latex smell made the flowers seem plastic and the nurses seem mechanic.

Several times a day she would awaken when the anesthesia wore off. And, she would smile, feeling the soft bed-sheets. Nothing truly entered her mind. Only the most primal gears were turning, her entire environment null and void, locked away in a more complex side of her brain. It would be just her and her body, but not even that. Just her and her forgetful soul, drunk on the waters of Lethe. _But then, she would remember._ And her eyes would tip, like saucers on the edge of a table, in the direction of the unnaturally white bandage. She would imagine what her skin looked underneath. She would see the damage very clearly, very vividly. There would be dried blood. Curled flaps of skin. A butter white layer of arm fat, stained red. The pink flesh, disturbing as a dead animal on the side of the road, insides leaking out and melting onto the pavement.

A cess pool. A tar pit.

Her body was broken, but she could feel nothing.

The reality of it? Well, it was simply hygienic now. Cleaned. The dried blood washed off. The skin iodinated. Closed in by walls numb-dumb gray. Comforted by the biting, white bandage. Laved in drugs.

How could any part of her be curled, raw, clotted and stitched?

_Despite her numbness, she could still feel the ring in her hand._ The pain washed over her, a pain no nerve suppressing drug could friction slow. It slid through her, shooting sparks like metal tailpipes against pavement, the screeching, the grinding. The regret. The stupidity.

She was pathetic. She had no sense.

_The circle of red grew on his chest, a flower she wished had never bloomed._

_

* * *

_

"Shit!" the young man swore, lifting the coffee-stained note from the table. He wiped up the spill with a paper towel and then, he patted the note dry. He unfolded it and sighed. The ink message was still intact. Then, he folded it into quarters and slipped it into his pants pocket. He would carefully dry it later.

* * *

Yuka didn't feel like salsa on fire, like her dance teacher had once said. Some switch was turned off and the room was too dark to look for it. Her body was a dead weight on the mattress, her demon for movement gone. For every dancer has a demon just like every writer has a muse.

"Do you know where you are?" he smiled. Yuka could only look at him through the nook of her eye. He had white hair and interesting eyes. His hands were clasped behind his back, and he stood swaying back and forth on his toes and his heels. A sturdy man with longer, black hair stood by the doorway, watching them, arms crossed over his chest.

"Or, perhaps, I should ask, do you know who I am?"

"No," it came out soft, a whisper, a cat squeezing out of a tiny place.

"I wasn't sure," he mused. "You can call me Byakuran," he said, waving off the introduction like signing his name. Yuka was still dizzy. She took a deep breath.

"Is this Nami General hospital? My Aunt? Is she okay?"

Byakuran's eyes squinted with his smile.

"You are at the Milliefiore base, in Italy, Yuka-chan, and you don't have to worry about your Aunt." He looked over to the man at the door. "Genkishi, she is worried about her Aunt. Her child self is so sweet!"

"Yeah, I'm Yuka." She had barely registered what he said. "But… Italy? How did I?" her voice questioned, stumbling over saliva.

Where was Lal Mirch? Where was Dino? Her eyes shifted to the stranger introduced as Byakuran, then shifted to the white bandage.

The bandage. The grinding regret.

Dino. Lal.

Because if they weren't with her….

* * *

A little paper, rolled up as thin as a cigarette, now coffee-stained, switched hands underneath the table. The recipient was tapped three times on the foot. When he smiled in response, the other guests thought it was in mockery of the black suit's odd hairstyle.

* * *

"Thank you for everything Byakuran-sama, but can I ask one more question?" So the ten year bazooka was responsible. How could she tell this was the future? She ate the conversation like spoon-fed ice cream, and it felt good to talk to someone, anyone, even though she passively listened.

"Of course~"

"Do you know… do you know where my mother is?" The word felt like a lump, a lump she had sat on all night. What kind of person was she now? Did she have a fight with Lal Mirch and Dino? Did something happen? Her mother was the only reason, _the only possible reason_, that she wouldn't be with them. If her mother was here, maybe it would be all right. A mother in a large and cozy sweater to her hug her close. _It's okay. It's okay._

Byakuran pulled over one of the visitors' chairs with a sweeping motion.

"I do, actually," he said, sitting.

"You do? Is she here?" She thought about getting up, but this man, this kind, kind man, he would help. His smile was disarming.

"No," he said slower, "she is in Vendicare Prison."

"Prison. Oh… in prison."

"What is it?"

"No, its nothing."

"Go on."

Yuka looked from Byakuran to the black-clad escort, aware that she had only just met them. They felt like her entire world now and it was easy to surrender her thoughts.

"Well, it doesn't make sense. She was set up, I bet!" Mothers don't belong in jail. They don't belong with serial killers and rapists. They were honest and hard-working, the best of women, whether with a tray of cookies or a briefcase. Mothers were love! Yuka tried to remember everything Lal Mirch had said about her mother and Yuka knew it. She didn't belong in prison. She didn't belong cold and wet and alone with metal and chains. She didn't belong hidden from the rest of the world.

She didn't belong hidden from her.

Her mom was for her. And just for her.

Meanwhile, Byakuran opened his cool, fresh eyes from his smiling squint.

"I believe Kali Mirch knew what she was doing." But, Yuka didn't eat what Byakuran suggested.

"Is it as bad as they say it is?"

"I believe we have gone over _one more question_."

"But is it?"

"Don't worry, Yuka-chan, don't worry! We made a deal, which, of course," his indigo eyes widened, "of course, you do not remember."

"A deal?"

"You are working for me in exchange for your mother's release."

"Really? You can do that?"

"Oh, I can do a lot of things," he grinned, breaking open a plastic bag of marshmallows.

* * *

A brown-tinted scrap switched hands on the bridge in the park late at night. The ducks quacked, but otherwise, the two men were alone. The giver tipped his hat and left. The recipient opened the note curiously.

"Damn bastard does it all," he chuckled. Then he tore off a corner and spit his chewing tobacco into it, and chucked it into the pond.

* * *

"Now, may I ask you one question, Yuka-chan? It will be quick. I know you need your rest."

"Yeah, that's fine."

"Where do you stand with Hibari Kyoya, of the Vongola." Unnoticed by Yuka, Genkishi stood up straighter in the doorway, his eyes more piercing. Yuka paled to Byakuran's favorite color, the tailpipe screeching through her.

"I… don't know."

Byakuran chuckled.

"Your younger self is very interesting." He got up. "You have not changed back into your older form, so that means Sho-chan's little device must be up and running. Hope you get well soon!" On his way out, Byakuran stopped in front of Genkishi, who bowed his head. Byakuran picked a little piece of lint off of the Phantom Knight's Black Spell uniform.

"Watch her, Genkishi."

"Master." His eyes switched back to Yuka, who had rolled over to go back to sleep.

* * *

"Hey toots, give this to your boyfriend for me. Tell him if he gets this job done, I'll forget about the bet he lost." She kissed him with her pouty lips, very sensually, and he wished she was really his woman. The posh stripper had a very elegant gait and didn't belong in this club. Before his arm could lace around her back, she pulled away and pushed him down into the chair. Soon lost in the hot, crowded club, the brown, torn note was held like a tip between her two fingers.

* * *

The teapot crackled, the metal expanding from the heat of the red burner. Yuka stood in a kitchen on the Black Spell side of the base. She blended into the ebony cabinets and dark granite counter in a black training uniform. Genkishi observed her leaning in the doorway with a hand resting on the hilt of his sword. He was so still, like a green pond's glassy surface, his blink, like a skating bug, too small to create any ripples. Genkishi wasn't watching her. He looked at the floor in a sort of meditation.

Nonetheless.

"I don't need supervision to make tea."

Now, it wasn't that Genkishi was bugging her. It wasn't that she disliked him, either. It was just that, well, Yuka couldn't cry. She had vaulted up in front of all these strangers. Where was she? Who was she? Italy? Millefiore?

"I'm just waiting for the drink."

"I can call you when it's done."

"I'd rather stay." Why couldn't she be alone? It was humiliating. She didn't need supervision like some little foolish child. She stared at the pot, willing her face blank. Her mask had slowly returned, even though it now hung with a sort of cheap, broken elastic band. The mask itself made of, perhaps, thin plastic and dull paint.

Lal and Dino.

She looked again over her shoulder, refitting the mask, her face numbing, yet her eyes hurting. She had never struggled so hard against emotion and it left her with an empty, hollow headache. Genkishi had the poise of an old hunting dog, an old black dog she never knew as pup, and she couldn't get why he followed.

Yuka poured the tea into two mugs. Even though her hands didn't shake, even though her breath didn't hitch, she still feared this teapot would also clatter to the floor, these cups break, this hot, hot liquid mix with her hot, hot tears. Concentrating on her lung muscles, setting her mind only on the way she breathed, Yuka walked over to Genkishi and held one mug out to him. She tilted her head upward to look him in the face. He was no lean frame, roughly her height, like the prefect. Taut muscles stretched his Black Spell jumpsuit. He had such control in the way he took the mug with both hands, cupping the bottom and holding onto the handle.

"What does it mean that I am your partner?" He wasn't friendly or easy-going like Yamamoto. He wasn't a domineering ass like you-know-who. He was just silent.

"It doesn't matter. You are not your older self," he replied.

"What do you _mean_?" He seemed so dark with his silence. She eyed him over the rim of her mug, blowing on the drink. Tea. It was the only calming substance around. Genkishi smelled his, but didn't bother drinking or blowing on it.

"Byakuran assigned me to you." Yuka looked down, thoughtfully, and Genkishi continued. "If anyone gets in the way, they die." Was he smiling? She looked up from the cup she decided was too hot for now. No, he was still deadpan, calm.

"He wanted you to protect me?" Insulted haughtiness emerged from her loose lips. _Knight in shining armor? _

"So you weren't disturbed at work. It needed your complete attention." Yuka took a deep breath, training her entire mind again on her diaphragm. It still came out a sigh. Frustrated with herself, she turned around and went to the kitchen table, sipping and smelling the steam.

"My research needed my complete attention…," she repeated.

"Mmm," he grunted. The door closed heavily behind the Phantom Knight and she heard his heavy boots tap back down the hallway.

Alone.

Finally, she cried into the warm, dark liquid. A different cry. A sane cry.

* * *

He had always wanted to be a writer, and she admired him for it. He had talent. How he collected those monstrous debts, how he got sucked into that world of crime, well, she didn't think it would be forever. She gave him the piece of paper and repeated his creditor's message. He looked away from her, but she kissed him on the forehead.

"I love you," she said. "You'll be fine."

"You don't know what I've gotten into," he replied and sank his head on the keyboard.

* * *

Byakuran, with a crescent-shaped pair of shears, snipped a yellow lily from the stem of a flourishing plant. He lifted it to his face, caressing the bottom of the flower, to study it closely. He loved the way the sickly yellow was mottled with little red spots, as if the flower had witnessed a murder. As if it had opened into bloom at the slash of a jugular. The tongue-like petals seemed to have lapped up the fresh, hot life.

Tossing the flower into a wastebasket, Byakuran returned to the singular glass table on the rooftop garden. It was bedecked with a pitcher of frosty lemonade, more sweet than sour. A white porcelain bowl held jumbo marshmallows looking like frogs eggs in milk. He sat down. Lippi would be on time, but the Millefiore boss was early. He had gotten through afternoon snack faster than he had expected, the desserts more filling than usual. Listlessly, he shifted his gaze to the roof's radio beacon, covered in satellite receptors and transmitters. It ruined the view.

Sighing, he speed-dialed the number he comically kept as his ICE contact.

"Sho-chan~ I'm bored," he said, smiling at the phone's webcam. His college bud had a puffy set of head phones on and a t-shirt of his favorite band. He seemed relaxed, but only for the first second of the phone call. The next moment, his rear kissed the floor because he had lost his balance. Silly Shoichi.

"Byakuran-san!" The headphones were off, stowed under the computer panel.

"Don't worry, Sho-chan. I don't expect you to be working all the time."

"Sorry, Byakuran-san."

"It came to my mind to call you this afternoon," he smiled cheerfully.

"Why? Is something the matter?"

"I missed you~"

Shoichi Irie sighed. It looked like his stomach was hurting again, the way his eyebrows knit.

He did a bad job hiding it. The way he paled, shaking slightly as he pulled himself together, typing on his computer to make it less noticeable. Shoichi's act was like white out. Byakuran could scratch it off with his pinky.

"Well, we have found nothing in Namimori. We've caught no activity related to the Vongola that backs up the rumors of their base. There's not much to report."

"I know that. Everything is going smoothly."

Shoichi pushed up his glasses, then crossed his arms.

"How is everything on your end? Has something happened?"

"The weather is simply perfect.

"Byakuran."

"We could play beach chess, like back during spring break."

"Please be serious."

"Ah, well, one of the Black Spell members seems to have been replaced with her younger self by the ten-year bazooka." Yes, his stomach was definitely pained. But Byakuran didn't suggest he take anti-acid. "Curious, how she hasn't poofed back yet. They say people return after ten some minutes."

"Yes, that is very odd," Shoichi agreed.

"She came in quite a condition, too. Made quite a show."

"What happened? How is she?"

"Oh, bleeding, muttering things unlike her," Byakuran waved it off.

Shoichi looked shocked.

"Is she okay?"

"Hmm. She's alive."

"Who is she? Which Black Spell member?"

"Oh, Leo-kun's here! I must be off, Sho-chan!"

"Byakuran-san, wait!"

"Bye-bye~" He waved his index finger, a little 'nuh-uh-uh I'm in charge of the conversation' to his cell phone's camera. Then, he snapped it shut. Phoning Shoichi was always entertaining.

"Leo-kun, what's your report? You look thirsty, you know. There's plenty of lemonade." Byakuran would offer anything except his fluffy treats.

"Uh, no thank you, uh sir."

Byakuran leaned back in his chair, playing with the apps in his phone. He was humming a little to himself, now. "Go on," he piped up.

"The Varia Assassination Squad is mobilizing. However, there is no definite indication of which base they plan to attack—"

"Don't worry. I can take care of that."

"Eh, um, you can? You mean you know where they will attack?"

"Yup. You see, I figured this would happen."

Byakuran eyed Leo like candy.

Leo ruffled through the sheets on his clipboard.

"Anyway, there isn't too much to report beyond the usual, sir. Their communication systems are under our complete surveillance and we have men watching the airports." Byakuran tilted in his seat, looking past Lippi and to the rooftop door that had squeaked open.

"I don't need the door _held_ open for me," Yuka commented. She clutched a watering can with two hands. How cute. Her white knuckles twisted on the pail. What would she do if he ripped it away from her? Oh, but he couldn't. At least, not today.

"Don't wander off. Water the plants later, if you want," the Phantom Knight said. Then, he nodded to Byakuran who, recognized it with a motion of his hand, and placidly left, closing the door behind him. In a sense, Genkishi was cute too. Like a Doberman. They made lovely pets.

"Is that the Black Spell girl from the past?" Lippi asked, glancing at the approaching girl.

"You know her?"

"Oh, well, White Spell doesn't talk to Black Spell very often, sir. I've just heard about it. I apologize, but I didn't know you had meeting scheduled so early, today. I'll leave." Lippi bowed, keeping his arms regimentally stiff by his side. Then he left, passing Yuka without looking at her, without introducing himself. Typical White Spell.

"It's nice up here. I can see for miles."

"Do you like Millefiore?"

"I do." She brushed the hair out of her face. "And to answer your question from before, I think my relationship with Hibari Kyoya was a mistake. That's how I feel."

He perked up. Byakuran was so used to lies. So used to magazine cut letters pasted on blank white paper.

"I'm glad to hear that you will not be against the mission, then."

"No, I'm not. When I woke up this morning, I got the report you sent concerning my mother," she replied, and he noticed the color had returned to her face since her time in the infirmary. There was something strong and new in her voice. Secrets fell open to him, not bloomed open, but fell open, like the way a dead flower bud falls apart with age. "I felt much better this morning. My arm doesn't hurt as much. I think it's all going to be all right." Byakuran remembered telling his secretary to inject a little hope into the information. "Everything is for the best."

Then, Yuka went off to water the bush of lilies he had recently clipped. The Millefiore boss took the bowl of marshmallows onto his lap, smiling as he bit into the softness. If these synthetic hunks of sweetness really were bad for you, _why did they taste so good?_

_

* * *

_

Genkishi waited for Yuka in the lounge just below the rooftop. His eyes were closed and he sat up straight, perfectly straight, bone-crackingly straight. He didn't have to open them to know the girl had come back from her meeting.

"The Vongola must not have been right for me," she said, not with any sadness, but more like a conclusion someone else had told her. "It's nice here. I can do what I want."

"As long as you are loyal to Byakuran," Genkishi said and opened his eyes to look at her. She didn't look like she took him seriously. She looked young and stupid. He didn't think he would have to beat anything into a woman like her older self.

"Why do you keep them? You don't use them."

"Excuse me?"

"Your swords. Why do you have four?"

Genkishi stood up. He wasn't used to this from her.

"Come with me." They began down the hallway, ignoring her pointless question, Genkishi in front, Yuka trailing a few steps behind. She still didn't know her way around the massive base. She couldn't really do what she wanted, like she had said. She could only shadow him around the base. Her statement was a contradiction; She had no freedom. Yuka tapped the pocket of her uniform jacket and didn't notice his passive curiosity.

"You like Byakuran a lot?"

"He saved my life."

Maybe she was silent because he didn't look the type to be saved.

"I like him, too. No one has ever helped me find my mother. It's kind of strange, that now, she suddenly exists." Pathetic. Only fixated on her damn mother, but who was he to say. His life belonged to another. His honor belonged to another. Genkishi was a man of few friends. He stopped and turned around outside a training room.

"Since you don't have any memory or experience to work on your research, you can help me train."

"Train?" She looked at his sword and at her bare hands.

"Don't worry. I won't touch my swords."

"No sword, huh?" She studied him for the first time now. His toned muscles, exercised every day, lean and fit. He could swim 500 meters in just under six and a half minutes with weights on his wrists and ankles. He could kill without unsheathing his sword, just by injecting some flame into his indigo box. "I think I can take you."

* * *

The White Spell secretary, pretended to rummage through his paperwork, and when he knocked his pen off his desk, he surreptitiously slipped the torn and coffee-stained remnants of a note into his left boot.

* * *

Yuka didn't know how to prove to him that she was feeling better. She didn't know how to say that her demon had returned, although that little flick of electricity still needed its strength. Yuka had a new chance at life, a caterpillar turned butterfly. She wouldn't be returning to the past, the ten year bazooka somehow broken. She was on a one-way road, everything black and white, everything disgustingly uniform, but maybe that was for her. And right now, she had to work with it. She had to work the system. The Millefiore system. The prison system.

She had no courage to rebel here, to stomp her foot down and demand what she wanted. Her mom, but Dino and Lal Mirch on top. They were out of her reach. So she would adapt. She would change her identity, her side in the chaos of this mafia world. Because she wasn't really changing, was she?

She was just becoming her future self.

Yuka removed her black jacket to reveal a gray tank top underneath. Maybe there was something wonderful in a uniform. Like equality… no she still missed the colors. But gray, it wasn't so disgusting. This uniform belonged to her older self, and a blonde business-like woman came to her mind, strong and independent. No, this outfit wasn't so disgusting. She followed the Phantom Knight into the training room. She never had considered this before, but when she looked at Genkishi, patient Genkishi, and at his black uniform just like hers, her heart thumped with pride. He didn't threaten her. He didn't call her foolish and weak. She did not have to stiffen at any insult. Neither did he flirt with her, which was, perhaps, the greatest relief.

He had manners, and in that sense, a knight was better than any punk.

"I am happy here." Her expression was wreathed in placid stoniness. Her face was relaxed, the usual turbulent muscles lost. "I know I was a part of the Vongola before, but maybe, this family is better for me. That whatever made me change was for the best." The Black Spell lieutenants were a rowdy bunch, but still greeted her warmly around the pool table. She could imagine getting along with them.

Yuka almost asked Genkishi what her future self was like, whether she was professional or boisterous, hot-headed or cold, but Genkishi spoke first.

"I don't care if you're happy." And with those words, something smashed into her ribcage. "Training begins now." Or at least, the pain of being smashed in the ribcage. Nothing had hit. She hadn't heard anything approach her. In fact, he was still standing a few paces in front of her, a black line against a gray wall. She clutched her midsection, searching for broken ribs, but there were none.

"What"—but something whacked her on the back of the neck and she fell forward, hands spread on the cold floor as pain shot up the nerve the knee-cap was supposed to protect. And something dark took over her soul just then. Like thin, thin string that had been slack all around her suddenly tightening like a noose. And she felt this prickling all over her body, pins and needles, uncontrollable, as if thorns ran along her bones and sawed at her flesh whenever she moved. And something black sprouted where she had been hit, a throbbing ball of pain. Still, she got up and fought off the weird sensations. It must have grown into her head now because a deep dark jungle with vines hanging down like trailing intestines had replaced the indestructible walls.

A delirium? Was she back in the nightmare she had escaped ten years ago? She wasn't naked. The uniform still clothed her She looked at her hands. What weird things they were! Such freakish unnatural shapes. Vision vibrated, passing in and out of her like a broken, wobbly pendulum.

Suddenly her heart screamed and her eyes closed shut. Can hearts scream? It felt like a hundred bubbles popped inside her chest, her heart eaten by them, melting in acidic froth. Thoughts came to her from some esoteric space and gripped her mind like harpoons under thick skin and put her mind in chafing harness, a bit that made a horse's mouth bleed.

The jacket.

No.

All she had was a jacket.

It was a lovely jacket.

So many possibilities.

Wrap it around his neck.

Shove it down his throat.

She could even bite off the buttons, the metal clinking on her teeth, and push them into that soft and sensitive place known as the eye socket.

Thoughts whizzed into her mind as everything turned black, but she couldn't move. The pain chained her, trapped her in this one spot. She couldn't speak. She couldn't open her mouth. And her eyes were closing, but everything she felt was a great as a bloated whale's carcass washed up on the beach. A slimy log wrapped around her foot and her ankle and it squeezed and it squeezed while her heart continued to sizzle. Tighter and tighter. More slimy jelly, heavy and wet, flopped onto her shoulder and squeezed and squeezed until her arm gave out. And one more slapped on her chest and pulled itself around her neck and up the back of her head. Sound was muffled. Colors like the back of a butterfly took over her the vision of her closed eyes, mixing with the dark black strings that cut her innards when she twisted and thrashed.

And she couldn't resist anymore. She couldn't doit anymore.

She just couldn't.

* * *

Genkishi looked down at Yuka, watching her thin hair slide weakly down her face. He couldn't see her expression, but her wrecked and heaving body, covered by a mountain of his spectral sea slugs, satisfied him. He could barely distinguish where one jellied mass started and ended on the pile, their colors like paint thrown on canvas, blending, blurring, and bleeding into little pools. With a thought like the snapping tick of a second hand, one of the slugs exploded.

_Put her in pain._

The command rang in his mind like a sermon. After he returned his flaming pet to its box, he jealously watched the White Spell uniform take the girl away, nodding to him and mentioning the infirmary. As Genkishi left the training room, he thought about how he didn't belong in black.

* * *

The sky is best cloudless, when the azure blue rules deep and proud. Yuka opened her eyes to face the drowning blue. Tree leaves rustled from the wind and when she turned her head, she saw green branches rising over the rooftop's parapet, the living pieces flowing with the air. Everything around her glowed with peachy warmth, and she realized _this was sunlight. _

Yuka didn't want to push herself up to be alert, to take in her surroundings. She just wanted to melt into the world around her, let it become her, let it breathe her. The rush of rubbing leaves and the salty-sweet smell of world after it rained. She wouldn't mind if it ended right here, cradled by the yellow-green light, between the arms of the rooftop and the face of the sun. She didn't mind if she took her last breath and did nothing, nothing more. Right here, everything was the way it was meant to be.

That was until Yuka felt something nudge her arm. Her eyes opened from her dozy squint. What she saw caused air to rush back into her lungs. _Hibari__. _Hewas standing above her, leaning against the wall, eyes closed just like hers had been. No ghost, all flesh! And nature, she forgot about it. Her life wouldn't end here. She couldn't fade away. _He was alive!_ She lifted herself up on her elbow.

"You!"

He opened his eyes a little bit to look down at her, then closed them.

"You're ruining it."

"You're not dead!"

He looked at her again, this time irritated.

"Why would I be dead?" Her eyes swallowed every inch of him, memorizing it all. Everything about him, so calm and steady, and she needed that. Even though he stood above her, even though she was looking _up _to him, he was still next to her. Beside her. There was no cockiness. No arrogance. All her feelings percolated to her face: relief, thankfulness, respect, for all that she had wanted… she couldn't look at him anymore. The feel of her smooth jade ring slipped into her palm like a soapy bubble. Her face, her rabid-fire emotions, there was nothing covering them up. Like papers blown off a desk by a fan. Her great waters flowed straight down, no barriers to filter or divert them. Her face cried for what hurt so bad but felt so good. This place. This person.

He was down on his knees, next to her, at her level.

"What's the matter?"

"Don't look," but his hand was already on her shoulder and he had already turned her around.

"Don't look." Why were her thoughts and her words the same? She wished her hair were longer so she could hide under it.

"Hey. What"—The feel of the ring was replaced by his hand—"are you doing?" He squeezed it hard and there was a growl in his voice, but it didn't seem that way to Yuka because he was pushing the hair away from her sticky cheeks.

And there she was.

Bare before him.

Bare, but big bare, not small bare, not tiny bare, not short bare, but enormously bare with her face inches away from his own. Her bareness, dressed in globs of fat tears and a weak smile, was big, so big, she thought her heart would break from the way it hurt. But his lips were there and he made it go away. He was kissing her and holding her hand. His jacket had slipped off his shoulders and he was in his clean, white uniform shirt. Her hands came to the fabric, her palms moist. She put everything she felt for him, everything that had been building up in her, everything she wished she could tell him instead of drown in fear and loathing and knives—instead of _stabbing_ him—all into pressed lips. There were no boundaries and there were no limits. All space and time was theirs and he agreed with her and she felt his agreement in the way he pushed into the kiss, his words in his touch.

Kissing him was like kissing the ground and thanking it for never giving way, the world's strength pulling her up as his kiss deepened. Yuka squeezed his hand, and more tears fell, but she could breathe.

She could breathe.

What was she before this moment?

* * *

Mukuro chuckled watching Yuka's sleeping face. He sat next to her on the infirmary bed and his demonic eye glowed with a small dying-will flame. As Leonardo Lippi, Mukuro had carried her into the health wing and pretended to sign the check-in sheet. All he had to do was smile cutely at the receptionist. He told the nurse that the girl had fainted, nothing serious. He told the nurse he was trained as a medic and he could take care of it. Of course, he locked the door behind him.

What would Kyoya think of what he was about to do?

The illusionist put his hand on her forehead, beginning the details of the younger cloud in the dream, having washed her first in his favorite world, a sterilizer. There was a method to madness, after all, just like any doctor's operation. A method to manipulation.

Some people call it psychology.

Oh!

Oh-ho!

She was crying. Her mind was crying and, on the bed, one of her fists was balled up, clenching something. What was this? Was her younger self in love with the cloud as well? With surgical curiosity, he told his puppet prefect to pick up her hand and her fist relaxed.

On the bitter white sheets, her claws gave way revealing a throbbing indigo flame, a coin-sized ghostly halo. Her skin underneath it blistered where it burned, white skin peeling back painlessly, he knew, the nerves destroyed. Putting his hand near it, a sort of sensor hovering over the energy, his two hell rings twitched on his fingers, trying to pinch him with short hot pricks.

The illusionist's smirk was a warped crystal ball.

"Kufufu."

His red eye ordered the dream to be gentle. For Mukuro Rokudo knew to blow gently when kindling a flame.

* * *

Yuka could feel a nasty purple bruise behind her neck. She didn't have to see the purple, blue, red, and green splotched that twisted on her wounded back to know of the injury. But she couldn't feel anything wrong with her left hand, mittened in white gauze, and that's what scared her. How could she not feel an injury? She was on no narcotics. The kiss—the dream! _The dream._

She sat up on the sick bed, bringing her gauze-wrapped hand to her drawn up knees. Her good hand came to her mouth, touching her lips…. It was only a dream. She took a deep breath, but a sharp pain stabbed at her lungs. It was the kiss of a ghost.

And then, Genkishi.

Why?

He had hurt her badly. Her back felt worse than any training-punishment administered by her Aunt. How could she have traded Lal Mirch and Dino for this? There must be something, anything, oh what! What could make Millefiore better than Vongola?

"My, my, my~ You shouldn't be moving."

She turned her head to see a man with long hair in a black trench coat and leather pants observing her from one of the visitor's seats against the wall. It was ten years later, but it was definitely him. That Mukuro Rokudo, who returned the knife. The knife. The knife? Where was it?

Shining with violet murkiness, she found the pocket knife solid in her hand. She couldn't wrap her fingers around it in time, her hand oddly weak. Mukuro swiped the object from her person, flicked it open and read the blade aloud, more for himself than for her. She didn't reach for it.

She didn't want to see it, really.

And she wondered how it could manifest like that. As if a cloud of microscopic gnats had merged into one.

"_To my fire, my perfect delight, and my perfect agony._" A satisfied expression weaved onto Mukuro's face. Yuka wondered what her connection was to him. Her heart felt like a net of little pebbles that could never form one solid rock.

"I will hold onto this for when the time is right."

"Why are you here?" The way he smiled at her was exactly the way he fought Hibari ten years ago: playful and poking.

"Your younger self is such a bother," he replied. "Isn't it obvious, Yuka-chan?" He flicked the blade closed and dropped it into his pocket. Then, he removed a dirty note, covered with the oil of many hands.

"Why, you are a traitor."

He handed over the note, demons dancing on his lips. Yuka's expression was priceless.

"Have a nice day."

Mukuro turned around and left, his long hair trailing behind him like the fins of an elegant fish. She didn't see the black trench coat mist away into a White Spell jacket. She didn't see the red eye turn blue as he took one last peek over his shoulder. No. Her eyes were lost on the note. Her hands were already shaking. The signature, the elegant black markings like the curling feathers of a blackbird, made her bite her lip.

_Kyoya._


	11. The Two Old Men

The Two Old Men

Genkishi's nerves penetrated his thick muscles the way tree roots delve into the elephant wrinkles of wet black rock. Through them, the twitching energy of of tarantula legs slithered, hungry and searching between the thinnest fibers of his body. He could sense so much of his powerful magnitude that he could not tell where his skin ended and the outside world began. Thus, he held himself in this perfect relaxation.

Genkishi's meditation room glowed in amber incandescence. He sat in a ring of wax candles. The polished wood floors were engraved with circles of intricate labyrinth etchings. He sat on the largest of these mandalas, the wood-cut grooves colored in white. His frothing mist flame leaked onto the special paint and channeled into the design.

His released energy, flowing as a river and spreading upon the floor, then evaporated into the air, projected the maze upward as if above hot pavement. The gleaming amber walls and the shivering air was the vision a man lost in an orange, sun-burnt desert of smoke and wood and yellow light. Similarly, these throbbing rivers of flames weaved around his muscles, through his arteries, and against his bones, and projected their energy into his mind like the diffusion of fire into air.

'_Be wary,' said the traveler. 'There is a sickness over that way.'_

While he looked back at his past, his memories, and his motives, the maze of ocher and indigo candlelight danced about him. As time passed, the orange wall faded to corpse blue. The phantom's heart rushed with his cold, deceptive flame, as he sank into a meditation that only death's tranquility could surpass.

* * *

The Millefiorre Base was a glistening skyscraper, a tribute to modern man, to industry, to glass and steel and the world as we know it. Rome was the old center of the world. Caesar had once marched into this valley surrounded by its seven hills victory after victory. This grand building rose high above the old brick apartments and ancient marble ruins, and passers-by that walked underneath always looked up in awe, as if looking up flipped their world on its head. As if they were falling down to meet their death in the sky and clouds.

From way, way up, Byakuran stood in front of the wrap-around window of his luxurious office. His hands were in his pockets, lilac eyes tracing the ant-like humans. They were all in such a rush. The world would regret not taking its time.

Smell the roses, he thought.

The tape recorder on his desk whirred as it rewound, high pitched voices skittering incoherently backwards. Shoichi had once stumbled across an old vinyl record that when played backwards, the singer said '_demon inside me_' as if he were ill and coughing. Shoichi found it quite interesting, since the band was one of his favorites.

Concentrating, and in a burst of light, he departed his body of this universe for another to snatch a new chess piece. A prince.

A few people down below shook their heads and remembered where they were walking.

"My name is Byakuran." So many times, he had introduced himself. "How about a deal?"

Back in his office, Rasiel promised he would destroy the Varia Leader, and with his head cocked mischievously to the side. "Many thanks for the ring." He lifted one hand to show off the ruby stone embedded in silver wings, and then left, his butler following behind him. Byakuran opened a few of his drawers, looking for something to scrutinize, but closed them bored. He then played the tape recorder over again. A colorful voice filled the white office like a pink bouncy ball in an indoor squash court. "Yuka-chan~" it began, all enthusiasm. "We're all set to attack, so you do your thing, you hear! Have a lovely dayyyyyy~"

To reward his genius, Byakuran chomped on a fistful of marshmallows like any Caesar would his grapes.

* * *

The worn out, discolored note felt soft in Yuka's hands. So wrinkled, it had the flexibility of leather. She held it close to her scrubbed clean face, the face of a girl dressed in uniform and expected to fit as a cog in a massive machine. The scrap was the size of a normal greeting note and when she held it up to her nose, she could smell a woody perfume rise through the coffee and sweat.

Even though the handwriting was dressed in extravagant ink cursive, the words themselves held no gaudiness, no poetry. It sounded like something he would say. How could she second guess such a message?

_If there's a problem, don't come._

_-Kyoya_

Frustration welled inside of her and she didn't understand what was going on or what was happening in this unknown future. She ripped the note in half, then put those halves on top of each other and ripped down again, until she had snowflakes of brown paper. Her wrist came up to her eyes, and she said, "My life is such a mess." Because of her injured hand, she had some difficulty.

The white room enclosed her once. She slid off the hospital bed and her eyes set on the door.

Yuka shivered under her black hospital Johnny. She was barefoot too as she slipped out of her room and into the infirmary hallway, making sure no nurse was in sight. She held a box of tissues – she felt she had to hold something to be here in this sterile ward. Her mouth was bitter and dry and she was hungry now that she was awake, but she didn't know how to get food or drink. Bulletin boards on the side had flyers for blood donations and organ donor contracts, and her eyes wandered on them. The white doors were set with black plastic numbers. A nurse turned the corner, but Yuka stood up straight and walked with dignity. The nurse looked at her queerly, then, she turned into a room while taking her stethoscope off her neck. Maybe she should have said something. Maybe she should have asked for her clothes? She felt it would be wrong to intrude, no, she feared this place.

She feared _this_ place. This colorlessness. This monochrome. A world of stone, but even less natural. A world of plastic. A world of white paint and black speakers set into walls.

So when she read 'stairs' on a heavier door, gray instead of white, Yuka heaved it open and hurried down countless flights barely a plan forming in her mind. She only knew her feet could carry her down faster than up. Down and down her feet stomped and marched, gravity taking over. Her knees lifted almost to her chest, she was in such a rush. Her hands pulled at the railing when she rounded and her feet skidded on the landings. She was practically falling. Down and down. She didn't pull herself together until she noticed the cameras. A security camera hung over the doorways of every other exit doorway. As she walked by the camera, it rotated on its mount. She just wanted to be alone, unwatched, in a spot all to herself. She halted on a landing without a mounted camera, yanked open the huge door. she used her body to keep it open.

Walls of rusticated stone masonry gleamed wet and rough as sharkskin. Rusty horseshoes were piled in a corner, half covered by a moldy, yellow tarp. More scrap metal, such as nails, keys, doorknobs, were stacked in wooden crates along the walls. There was even an oil barrel filled with aluminum soda tabs. The nails made her look down briefly at her bare feet. She thought of ripping up a bit of her Johnny and tying it around them, but what good was that? Johnnies were paper gowns. She wobbled away from the door and into the queer, anachronistic room, closing out the light as it closed. Her hands groped for the long narrow aisle between the crates.

There is an uneasiness that come with pure, prison darkness. Walls of crates and her blindness in the hall gave a sense of claustrophobia as if the color black was constricting. Ceiling pipes leaked water on her flimsy covering as Yuka passed beneath. There were earring backings like sharp pebbles and eating utensils like spikes, belt buckles and bicycle locks hung as chains around her handholds. Finally, as she crept around a barrel of wristwatches, though she would have only known them as such in the light, her hand found smooth wood, unlike the splinter filled crates and it was up against the wall. Yuka turned and spread her palms upon this spot and finally gripped a brass handle. She opened it stealthily so the click was hushed and then, she pulled it open and tottered into a fresher, well-lit room.

Inside, the walls were of smoother, prettier stone. An oil lamp was set on a broad desk. Next to the desk sat a simple bed and bureau, all under a low ceiling. Yuka only took a quick look as she heard the clinking of metal on stone coming from the outer passageway. Friend or foe? Stranger most likely, she decided, but she didn't know how to behave or what to expect in an area of the base such as this.

The door opened and she still stood in the middle of the room. There was nowhere to hide as the bed was not lifted above the ground. A hunched, cloaked figure entered pushing a trolley and humming. He stopped upon confronting the sparsely dressed girl in a wet paper Johnny. With a deep and raspy voice, he spoke:

"Ho Ho Ho! Now what do we have here? Ehhh?" Under the black hood, a rag hung over the old man's eyes. The cart he pushed jiggled on the uneven stone floor, the stones on top clanking on the metal. Rings decorated his knotty fists, which lifted to take a piece from his push cart, a rock of lustrous ore. His other hand leaned on a cane carved with a vultures head, painted vile purple and orange. Yuka stepped back nervously, inspecting him head to foot.

"Excuse me… I'm going back to my room. I got lost coming from the infirmary," she huffed weakly. "Would you know the way, sir?" Here she was in this old man's bedroom! She felt awful and extremely awkward for intruding. Despite her embarrassment, she didn't like the way his smile lifted on those blistered old lips.

"A little girl in all black. It's not a pleasant sight," he said rapping the cane on the ground, "isn't it genie?"

Like a cloud of smoke pumping out of a steaming gutter, Yuka's doorway was suddenly blocked by a tall man also dressed in black. His trench coat and tall boots glistened rebelliously in the dank, medieval cellar. Yuka paled and started away.

"How did you…?" she quivered. Mukuro looked at her amused, his lip curving into a similar smile as the old man's, only with more elegance.

"I have my ways," he hissed and Yuka held her elbows in the cups of her hands nervously.

"So you're a Genie then?" Yuka looked at him skeptically, her tone disappointed. Genies were supposed to be servile.

"One of sorts," Mukuro mused. "Only older. But I'm not here to answer your questions."

"Talbot, you called me early?"

"It's all right. I can leave," Yuka uttered. This dark alleyway in the Millefiore complex suddenly grew with a shadow of menace and humor simultaneously.

"I'm afraid I'm all out of ruby slippers, Yuka-chan," Mukuro said, pinching her paper clothes as she passed him. He pushed her back into the room with the flat side of a long trident that had materialized into his hands. "So settle down, there's work to be done," and then he turned to the hunched, cloaked old man. "Talbot, I thought we had an agreement."

"She came on her own." Talbot murmured humorously. He did not face her, his hidden eyes not making it necessary. Mukuro was quiet for a while, tapping his trident on the stone floor in impatient thought.

"All right, then it is time."

"What's going on?" Yuka asked, unsure if she was held here to learn of a secret her older self had taken part in. "You took me to the infirmary."

"It's complicated," Mukuro said, looking around the room for a second. "It's lucky he's away. Talbot, I expect you to take care of this. Genkishi is tricky."

"If it will help the Vongola, Mukuro Rokudo. I am but a humble ring-smith. I meddle with metal, indeed, indeed, though against my will for this family. I make fine rings. However, any decent jeweler can hold his own against a trickster."

"Yes, yes" as if to put away a long story that hung on the tip of the hold-man's tongue. "There's no time to lose then. Yuka, how do you feel right now?" Mukuro casually studied her.

"Why do you ask?" Yuka asked suspiciously. She had walked over to the bureau and pulled open the drawers. She needed fresh clothes. She couldn't stand these dirty paper garments. "I'm _fine_. But I want to change." The drawers were empty. "Does anyone live here?"

Mukuro ignored her statement. "Fine? Is that so? You haven't been yourself lately. At least that's how Genkishi perceives it, and I think you cause him endless confusion. Since you have been replaced by your younger self, you have perhaps acted more your true self, Yuka—which is nothing very dangerous at all," Mukuro said. Yuka turned from the drawers.

"I'm not dangerous because I don't feel like it," Yuka said sourly. Mukuro looked disbelieving. Talbot rapped his cane, as if in applause. Yuka, defeated, opened a top drawer which contained a single, shiny black and white photo. "What was my older self doing anyway?" The photograph was of black-suited woman with stern blond hair in a bun and feinting a smile. "Why was she here, of all places?"

"Why, pretending."

"Pretending to be something she was not," Talbot clarified. Mukuro walked out of the hallway, distracted, but Talbot continued. "Suddenly, you're an innocent, little girl. That nightmare outfit doesn't suit you anymore."

"Genkishi knew me well, but he doesn't say anything."

"Yes, you shared a bedroom, but I doubt he knew you. You were pretending. Very well," Talbot cleared his old throat, "but then again, what would a smith know, eh? And that is all I'm going to say. My sheep know more on this subject of fornication." Genkishi was capable of sex? But he was so cold, so aloof. He never hinted once to such a relationship. Nothing he had done suggested what this old man implied.

"But why was I pretending to like him?" Yuka leapt in. "Was it to be close to Byakuran, so that I could eventually have my mother released? Was I using him, or did I love Genkishi?" This was an important question. Could _it_ happen to her?

"It was on your mind," Mukuro said returning, staring at Talbot amused. The old man was grating at the hunk of metal with an old file. Then, his eyes shifted back to Yuka and he continued pompously, waving his gloved hand.

"However, I can deliver your mother from Vendicare just as well as Byakuran. Both of us have made this promise to you, in fact," he said. "It's an easy promise to make."

"So it's not real," Yuka muttered quickly.

"Hoho, don't get him started on reality, little girl," Talbot rasped, his body shaking with old laughter. Mukuro gave him a silenced look, but the old man was too bemused.

"Well," Mukuro said seriously, then he smiled coolly. "Both our promises are real. You dance with powerful and dangerous men."

The two men had paused in the conversation, giving her room to speak, only she didn't want to. She wanted to push back the silence as one might a platter of some putrefying substance, only there was no platter tangible to physically remove from her presence. They waited for her to react, as if their teasing should be taken lightly with a agreeable smile on her side.

"_I am not a whore_," she announced. And she wasn't. She was still young, she had never gotten that close to a man before and her personality wasn't about to let her anytime soon. But what is a girl when she is faced with the knowledge of her future, lifted from the dank soup of the unknown. What is she when what she sees disgusts her?

"Are you so sure now?" Mukuro asked. He had the nose of a possum, a face like the skull of a rat, she realized. He repeated it again so softly. "Are you so sure now?" His voice seemed to draw aside a curtain in her mind. A navy blue curtain like the sky at night, and she shuddered as images were fed into her vision, set on fast-forward. Voices were low and infrequent. A red light blinked in the reflection of a mirror, and there was rhythm on the floor, an unstoppable rhythm that wouldn't break until Yuka shouted in anger and the vision broke. "You are exactly that."

"Well, then, you better get going now. Give me your ring," Talbot said "It's jade, I believe."

"No. You—" Yuka began.

"Do you know what you're doing?" Mukuro's tone beat down on her with its questioning, sarcastic arrogance. "Do you know how much planning it took to get you out of this base? Give him your ring." Yuka shot a bitter, uncomplacent glance at both men. Then, she found the purple jade on her finger—as if it had reappeared in her need.

"Didn't you take this from me?" she asked Mukuro heavily. "Yes I gave this to you!" She pulled it off, looking at Mukuro and thinking how the hell she'd become associated with him, but still frightened of him seizing her mind. Most of all, she was afraid of his relationship with her older self.

"It is bound to you, unfortunately. Now hand it to him. We must be off."

"But I have nowhere to go outside this base," Yuka said while reluctantly giving her ring to Talbot.

"Your living arrangements have been taken care of," Mukuro concluded and turned to Talbot. "So what do you say, old Sheppard?"

"Powerful rings contain spirits," Talbot cackled. "I've heard Byakuran has tampered with this one. We must be careful. It might be cursed, from what you've told me." Talbot put down his rock and file and felt the ring with expert hands.

"It's not cursed!" Yuka yelled. "It's my mother's! It's anything but!"

"HEHEH! Indeed she is right!" Talbot announced. "But it has its own breed of danger, a very hungry ring. Why," his eyes shifted to Mukuro Rokudo, and then he hobbled over to the sly man and whispered, "It only needs a soul to become another hell ring."

"I figured as much," Mukuro answered and took the ring back from Talbot as smooth as a pocket thief. "Thank you for breaking its connection with her." Yuka leapt up at Talbot's cloak, trying to take the ring back, but the old man swung away. Then she launched herself at Mukuro, who chuckled and glided out of reach as a toreador avoiding the horns.

"It's connected to me! Of course it is! It's my mother's!"

"Let's go!" the illusionist answered and, pulling Yuka backwards by the wrist, he leapt into the dark hallway.

* * *

"Let go! I can't see, let me at least—," Yuka exclaimed, but the hand on her wrist ignored her complaint and continued to drag her through the darkness. She stumbled and tried to turn around but everything was moving too quickly by her and she couldn't make her bearings, pulled and yanked this way and that in her blindness. She couldn't see a single step she took, and neither did she trust her steps. They led her through a maze and the whole way, her shoulders bumped into wooden crates and stone walls, until finally, she emerged into the stairwell. Only beside her stood a fat woman in a white spell uniform.

"What…," her deep husky voice shocked her and she looked down at her body.

A man's body, a middle-aged, skinny, wrinkled old man's body torso, legs and feet were beneath her. She felt her neck where her voice ought to be and her hand held the lump of an Adam's apple instead. Two crutches were nestled under her armpits and her foot had a white cast on. The fat woman's hand came up and pushed her shoulders down, instructing her to lean on the two sticks.

"Darkness is only an illusion," the portly woman squeaked, smirking.

* * *

Mukuro, with sweet, helpful tugs, as that might be given to a dying horse, assisted the disabled Yuka down several flights of stairs. His womanly eyes were glossy as a dead fish and his polished hands were cold on her arm. Was he really inside that woman's body like she was in this man's? Downwards, the couple descended. Yuka found her new body clunky and slow, overweight in the midsection. Her eyes disagreed with her brain when it came to the true length of her arms and where the exact perimeter of her skin lay. Was this a mask or truly part of her body, a sort of extension to it? She could touch what it touched, hear what it heard, eat what it ate—she could sense hunger, but nothing beyond a sugarless-voice in the bloodstream—the stomach distant and walled by foreign cells.

They exited the stairwell at another lower level, but still not the ground-level. Yuka's old man feet tromped into a garden, with a skylight that didn't make sense if there was a floor above, but yet there it was, a roof of glass with sunshine pouring in and warming the broad leaves of the plants. She limped with her crutches on a pebbled park pathway, looking up at the high domed ceiling of glass panels. Mukuro's portly woman walked at Yuka's side now, going at Yuka's pace and looking around as if he were enjoying a walk on a nice summer's day with an old buddy. Yuka looked closer at his disguise. The woman had very fine wrinkles covered up with garish make-up, her chestnut hair lifted in a tight bun. The White Spell uniform looked tight on her fat body, the buttons nearly bursting. In contrast, Yuka's fit the way it was supposed to. The lady's bulbous nose was slightly misshapen, and she seemed to have spent to long bathing in a jar of pickles.

"Can I have my ring back?" Yuka grunted. Her armpits hurt where the crutches dug in.

"That won't do, Yuka-chan. Your sentimentality are so obviously your weakness."

"Where is it? Just give it back and I'll leave Byakuran, Vongola, everything. Whatever you want!" She followed as well as she could on her crutches.

"That won't do either," the woman said. "However, I'm not giving you the ring back."

"What will you do with it then? It's just a ring." Yuka looked at the woman skeptically and finally her sarcasm suited her gender.

Still, she had only a very faint clue as to what was happening here at Millefiore base. There was a war outside these walls—she wasn't blind to the training rooms and combat instructors. Byakuran had been curious of her relationship with the Vongola, and with Mukuro escorting her now around the base, she was uncertain as to how exactly the Vongola were connected to Millefiore. She studied Mukuro's hobbling figure in front of her, trailing manicured fingers through a bush. "Or it's not my business to ask why you need my ring?" she added.

The old woman shook with her chuckle. Then she twisted around. Both stopped walking.

"You are assisting me with research for the Vongola. You are _also_ a member of Millefiore. To one, you are a traitor, understood?"

"Which one?"

"Well, I have never trusted you, but who am I to judge?" Mukuro's eyes narrowed and his thin lips pursed, which seemed more of a habit to the body he dwelt than any expression of the man's true body. "I have merely enjoyed your company." And with that little remark, he melted into a satisfied smile, turned around and continued down the way.

"Well, I doubt I enjoyed your company." Yuka grumbled.

Could she assume he was a friend? She now lagged behind, limping slower on her chunky bandaged foot, and the old woman seemed unlikely to turn around. Suddenly, she turned left, pumping her crutches as fast as she could. The pebble pathway narrowed and the hedges grew taller. She turned several more corners, not sure where she was going but wanting to be away and on her own once more. Maybe she could escape disguised by this new body? Stopping, she pinched the hairy man's forearm to see if it was real.

"What are you doing, Kaltashov?" Yuka looked up and one of her crutches fell to the ground. Genkishi strode up to her, his large build finally equal to her own, and they now stood at the same height. "Close your mouth," Genkishi instructed as he approached.

"Going for a walk, sir." His eyes darkened and suddenly, an indigo flame awakened from the ring on his hand, which drew Yuka's own eyes—the hand came to her neck and she shuddered, and would have stepped back if it weren't for the crutch hooked under her armpit and locking her where she stood. His fingers clung like spiders hairs on her possessed man's spine.

"What are you doing, _Kaltashov_?" the Black Spell Officer whispered in her ear. "You drip with mist flame."

"It's Yuka," her man's face crumpled into her emotions. "I don't know what I'm doing. This place, the people here. I know no one." She felt like the illusions boiled off her skin in a cool light. Genkishi was so close, how could she not bring her arms up around his neck in an embrace that wasn't coy or seductive, but of a human being who might hug a life vest when lost at sea. "I'm a stranger," she said leaning whatever body she had now into him. The bruise on her cheek running down over her back and the bandage on her hand—they were erased.


	12. Sacrifice

Sacrifice

Hibari's heart was like a cave with stalactites and stalagmites and spiders that are good at seeing in the dark. Glacier slow, the lime spikes grow until they are finally united as a pillar. Hibari Kyoya thought there to be a great space between he and Yuka and that they could never live long enough to touch in this metaphorical cave. Still, he had several bonds he would forever deny. This was evident by many things: Kusakabe cooked for him, Ryohei was somehow allowed to keep him company a few nights, and he had a good opinion and respect for Tsuna's morality. They were decent people in the end, though all utterly useless and incompetent compared to him.

So Hibari did not think of the adult Yuka often. Though he moped and sat bitterly by himself for many days, it was not usually about a lady, but the other bits and pieces of his life. Tsuna's plans, the ineptitude of his men. He bottled himself up a lot. He looked into his magnificent garden a lot. Hibari did not dream of her. He did not clutch a lock of her hair. The pain of her absence did not break his heart like waves upon a lonesome cliff. He was a busy man, the leader bee of his hive. He had plans across the board. All of Amano's plots could be inferred from the notepad he kept in his breast pocket – the time machine, Leonardo Lippi, and Shoichie's desperate plan. When elder Yuka visited him, she would stare at his face while he looked down or out at the garden or into his tea. It was good that she was silent and he could think undisturbed about his plans.

Meanwhile, Kusakabe would see his boss hold a conference with a woman in the push-up bra and painfully high-heels – all sass in her black and white, a penguin of a sundae, but in the end, he considered her too sweet. Too much whipped cream, too much processed cherry syrup, the chocolate sauce was over-done and all your teeth grind on were gritty sprinkles. She had no ice cream at the bottom. Kusakabe thought she was nothing his boss could live off of while he spooned perfectly round dollops of rice into the small green bowl.

Today, while Hibari waited for Kusakabe's rice, he rechecked the route from his mountain abode down the mountains to the small village below. Europe was a fine place filled with fine old things, and though it was not the same as Japan, Switzerland suited him. His house was the only one on the mountain. You could not see the road up through the trees.

When he finally drove down the winding road, past grazing milk cows and over cobbled streets and by wind turbines as sleek as his car, he thought of the woman employed by the Millefiore. In his breast pocket, there sat the plot of a different author.

At last he parked outside a beer garden. The café's yard was covered in vines and small, round, glass bistro tables. The flowers grew in a mess. He ordered an aged wine, and though he didn't drink it, he didn't mind the scent and the way it mixed with the flowers. For thirty minutes, he sat like this, eyes tilting this way and that. He picked at a little lint on his suit, checked the clouds in the sky, never fidgeting for he was not prone to nervousness. When he at last checked his watch, he found he had waited five minutes longer than he had planned. As he walked to his car, Hibari's face warmed into a gloat.

* * *

Now if the old Yuka met the new Yuka, she would beat her around the block before redoing her hair with a puffy 90s scrunchie and prattling to her to suck it up. Here she was, clinging to Genkishi. Genkishi looked down at her heaving, gurgling shoulder as a standing cobra might his rat. Yuka's face melted into his shoulder, tears bubbling and popping and out of control.

Genkishi thinks he is in some terrible soap opera. He know that the perfect heroine is just the right balance of confidence and insecurity. He's not stupid. He's read Pygmalion and Shakespeare and you can bet he's never picked up any of those shojo novellas. But here is a girl that's either all plus or all minus, black, then white, then black, and its confusing and idiotic and pointlessly painful.

Meanwhile, Yuka is finding it difficult to be in balance, especially when she is a rebel. She is the opposite of what anyone says she is. Lal Mirch succeeded by squeezing her like a blood orange, berating her with insults. Reborn wasn't the only one that made it rough for Tsuna. And don't you see? Yuka, the little girl from the Midori block, well, her heart is breaking, the bean sprout of her frustration is cracking open the thin skins of the hollow space in her chest, and the roots are nosing down. Little girls, little girls. Ah, they are beautiful little creatures, no? Maurice Chevalier can sing forever about what it means to be a child and a girl and a young woman, but in the end, he will never understand the real thing. She wondered who she was and who loved her and would fight with her, and she cried because she could not know. She had no definition of who to say 'fuck you' to. Her enemies glitter about allusively like the sequins on the bull-fighters cape. Her point of view can't even be written any more. It's too much for me.

Now Genkishi, he is a different story entirely. He isn't some spunky blue-white fan fiction page to be read on an iPhone, but a real hard cover book! Yellow pages! Cracking spine! The title is rubbed off and the English is so old that it's a whole other language. He too is difficult to translate as well. All that can be said is that it is a rare and ridiculous universe that brought these two together. But what would be a good story if foiling characters did not crash upon each other like Moses' parted sea. Let this tangent continue: Did you know that in the original _Snow White_, the princess didn't fall asleep? She died. She was an icy white corpse, and that wickedly charming prince slung her over the rump of his horse, trotted her to his castle, and fornicated with her dead body? Genkishi isn't a happy ending either. A Disney heroine doesn't belong in the arms of a Grim Brother's prince. But there she is, the most delicate part of her heart wrenched open by a mischievous hell ring. One day, when it finally could be worn, it would look like a slim, black leech twisted into a circle, and where the jewel might be, petals of teeth would open and close.

Yes, Yuka and Genkishi had lain together, as the bible might say. Genkishi suspected her of nothing but foolishness and stupidity. He took what he got and swallowed without tasting. Sometimes, he found it all tedious and time-consuming, but Byakuran had suggested it to him as frat brothers do reminiscing upon the girls that come to their parties.

So with this little Yuka thing clinging to him like a koala bear, weeping tears, snot, and even a bit of drool onto his uniform, the man was all self-control. His serpentine eyes considered her disgraceful, for Uni had never shown him such a face. This was Byakuran's business, too, and he already reeled about what to tell the man sitting above these glass ceilings and upon the highest floor. He removed her by the collar like a naughty cat and she fell away easily. Her arms slid away until they crossed loosely over her chest, and she could not look at him.

And for Byakuran, eating his ambrosia – heavy on the marshmallows and light on the peach syrup – he had high hopes for the twisting of Yuka's heart. Casual sleeping with the woman hadn't accomplished what removing the child's hug had.

And through all this, Mukuro's old lady fingers pushed aside the leaves of the hedge to spy on the situation. He was an expert at smothering his presence by now, and he picked up all his strings as delicately as spider threads and watched the insects bat their wings.

A mother might call it a tantrum, an animal trainer might call it breaking, a psychologist might call it a catharsis, but Mukuro, in all his mystical glory saw only the rawest and fiercest of emotions. He saw the leech that hatched wildly and fed upon the girl's excellent nutrition angst, and all her problems circled and built inside of her like a hurricane. Soon, the umbilical cord would be cut, but he could not completely confiscate the ring from the girl to which this misty string was ties. He had never been able to hold onto it. It would always return to Yuka's hand until she sacrificed it once and for all in return for a wish of desperation.

The wish of a dying will, of one trapped in her custom-made hell.

Like Talbot, Mukuro knew how the great Hell rings were invented. Only the agony of a woman in love can bear such a burden, and where Byakuran maneuvered Genkishi with boxes of chocolates and fed him lines to repeat to the spy he harbored, Mukuro would slip another man into her dreams. For he knew, Hibari Kyoya, the cloud of the Vongola, had earned a great respect from his pot of fertilizer. And with all the hell rings he currently possessed, one could say, he had mastered the recipe quite well by now. The hell ring can be smelted from any form of love so long as it is pure and powerful and desperate – think of the power of a martyr. Leonardo Lippi and Byakuran's imprisoned Talbot would have cups of tea together on the topic, sipping, chuckling and cackling about the fools long ago. But Mukuro never had Talbot's hobby of taking up the jeweler's glasses and admiring the pieces, reading their stories in their color and their clarity, listening to their pained glints. Mukuro only cares for authenticity, a beggar biting a coin, and today, his cunning would beat Genkishi's.

Mukuro held out this palm. Through the hedge, Yuka, in her last clawing attempts for returned love from a mother, a lover, a friend, traded her ring and all of her dying will power for the one who loved her most. It is a corny wish, but people think they are only worth as much as they are loved. The ring dropped onto the misty string that Mukuro had tied innumerous times, for it was good at wriggling free, and the wish bounced alive. He string vibrated with its power and he strengthened it with a flick of his red eye. Meanwhile, Yuka's figure popped, sizzled, and smoked out of Genkishi's grip in a raw, primal magic that the ten-year-later bazooka had only perfected. Her ring, at last, remained behind.

And as Mukuro walked away and Genkishi knelt to inspect the grass below, a thunderous smoke filled the black car on the empty highway confronting the first waves of the Alps.


End file.
